[FX.php List] fx.php website speed issues

Thu Oct 9 08:31:27 MDT 2008

Bob,

                Thanks for your thoughts! Makes me feel a little better
about Filemaker. 

                We are not using any IWP and 95% of the time there are no
Filemaker Pro clients connected. We do have customers doing FTP transfers on
this server and occasionally some scripts are run from the server as well as
backups but I've made sure these occur only a few time throughout the day.

                It's interesting what you say about PHP code, I always
thought that running PHP would be faster than Filemaker scripts and
calculated fields? Maybe we should start there, I know we do some hefty
calculations using PHP?  

Dennis Dalziel

Production Manager

G & R Publishing Co.

507 Industrial Street

Waverly, IA 50677

319-352-5391

From: fx.php_list-bounces at mail.iviking.org
[mailto:fx.php_list-bounces at mail.iviking.org] On Behalf Of Bob Patin
Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 9:20 AM
To: FX.php Discussion List
Subject: Re: [FX.php List] fx.php website speed issues

Dennis,

We host lots of FileMaker-powered websites here (approx. 80-100); some are
very small, some get regular traffic. While there are times when I see that
response is slower than others, I can't say that we *ever* get timeouts
unless a) I've written some goofy code, or b) I'm asking PHP to do a huge
amount of processing that takes a while to complete.

The first thing I would suggest is that you separate your web server from
your FileMaker Server. Your FileMaker Server machine should have one duty,
and one duty only, and that is FileMaker Server. Get a 2nd machine and put
your web server on it, along with the WPE; this shifts a lot of the load
away from FM Server. 

If clients are doing FTP transfers, this moves them away from FM Server as
well...

Your user load doesn't sound excessive; we've got a site that gets 1500 site
visits a day, and within that visit there are probably 10 queries or other
FM transactions that occur; that's just one of the sites on this particular
pair of servers, and it runs very well, day after day. 

A couple of questions: are you doing any IWP from the same server? What
about the other users on the server, are they running long scripts?

I'm about to start a project in the next month, where we're going to be
doing some reports on the web; the plan is to do most of the work in scripts
on the server, and leave PHP to do the charting portion. After some initial
tests by the other consultant on this project, who is a brilliant guy, he's
convinced that we'll get better speed by doing these particular functions in
scripts and not in PHP. So that's another thing to think about--if you have
PHP code that is slowing things down, it might be worth doing some testing
with scripts doing heavy lifting in select circumstances.

Hope this helps,

Bob Patin

Longterm Solutions

bob at longtermsolutions.com

615-333-6858

http://www.longtermsolutions.com

iChat: bobpatin

AIM: longterm1954

FileMaker 9 Certified Developer

Member of FileMaker Business Alliance and FileMaker TechNet

--------------------------

FileMaker hosting and consulting for all versions of FileMaker

PHP . Full email services . Free DNS hosting . Colocation . Consulting

On Oct 9, 2008, at 8:44 AM, Dennis Dalziel wrote:

                We have a fx.php website that has been having issues with
speed. I'm not sure if this is an issue with the code, limitations with
Filemaker or the way our server is configured.

                We have a website that is receiving about 400 logins to
accounts per day and users are accessing and editing a database that has
over 100,000 records. Looking at Filemaker's statistics, the number of web
clients at any one time can spike up to 7 but is normally between 1 and 4
clients.

                The problems that we are having are slow response times from
the server and clients are getting timed out and receiving fx errors, it
seems like the database is responding slowly and fx eventually just gives up
trying to get data returned. A few times a day the server will stop
responding all together for a few seconds, it seems as though the Windows
services shutdown and need to take a break, so no one can access the
websites for a time.

                We're running on a Windows 2003 Server machine with a quad
core processor, 4 gigs of RAM, RAID hard drives and a gigatibit NIC card. We
have 2 websites running on this machine, one is very busy and one is not,
using Filemaker 9 Server.

                We've tried to make the code as efficient as possible by
having our Filemaker layouts return only the necessary data and indexing all
of the fields that we can. We may have a few too many calculated fields, not
sure how that would affect the speed or how many would be considered too
many.

                My question is: Is there something that we're missing as far
as the setup of the Windows/Filemaker server? Is there a problem with our
code that we're not seeing or is this about as much traffic as a Filemaker
website can handle and we should look to a SQL based solution in the future
to speed everything up?

                I would really appreciate the thoughts from some of you that
have experience hosting Filemaker websites. We have a very nice website but
I'm afraid that our customer's experience is suffering from the slow
responses from our server.

Thanks!               

Dennis Dalziel

_______________________________________________
FX.php_List mailing list
FX.php_List at mail.iviking.org
http://www.iviking.org/mailman/listinfo/fx.php_list

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.iviking.org/pipermail/fx.php_list/attachments/20081009/ef552c04/attachment-0001.html