Hi, I've got a problem. I recently upgraded to Filemaker Server 9 (the
expensive version), console version 9.0.3.326, but am kind of sorry I
did, since I've been getting database disconnects. About two weeks ago
our database would go down kick everyone off line, making the
databases report being "in use" with dialogs like, "Products.fp7 is
currently in use and could not be opened. If the fileis shared, you
can use the Open Remote command to open the time." The files seem to
be unusable when this crash/kicking of, and it's causing a huge amount
of stress in our organization. To fix the problem before, I recovered
two files that seemed to be the worst off (our products and invoices
database), removed some old invoices and compacted some of my bloated
files, and things were running smoothly since then. Until today, when
the same thing happened, forcing me to think we've got a serious
problem.
In the past, I'd been through "Database server hell," rebuilding
databases from scratch to make them work right only to have them get
trashed again. On two occasions, once a G4 tower acting as a server
and another time with a G5 tower that was a client on the network,
there seemed to be "bad hardware" involved, with the result that
replacing the machines caused the problems to go away magically. If I
need to, I'll upgrade our current Filemaker server machine, G5 2.0
ghz, to an Intel Power Mac, if people here think it's warranted,
either from a stability point of view or if files hosted on Intel
hardware is much faster than the PPC machines.
Any feedback on a) how to chase down whatever corruption is causing
the databases to kick themselves offline, b) is there a way to clear
the "in use" status of databases after a crash, and c) general
thoughts on what server hardware I should be running, would be
appreciated. I just want my databases to behave ^_^
