Any fix?

Will there at least be some incremental update to fix the crashing problems?

We've struggled a bit lately trying to overcome the constant crashing problems with OG. Again, seeing as how it is based on FM, I cannot necessarily fault OG, when it is FM that is blowing up. It is just a poorly written app.

We have done everything imaginable and have isolated all the crashing to FM and FM only. What happens is the machine completely locks up. No mouse movement. It just freezes the whole machine.

I am running OS 9.9.2 with 160MB of RAm on an iMac. FM server is using 85MB, the Mac OS 27MB and keep it up 668k. FM Server 5.0v1

I generally have around 50MB of free memory in the system at all times.

We only have KIU on it to try to figure out the crashing problems. KIU does not reboot the box when it dies, nor does kick off. Neither work because the crash is so low level.

I have been monitoring the hell out of this box for a long time now. We thought there might be some outside force so it is on an interal IP range, it is firewalled, we boosted the memory on FM. Very minimal extensions running, no other Apps by OG running, no directory indexing or other stupid apple bloated processes running.

Here is what the server looked like in terms of FM load on the processor at just prior to the crash today.

--------------------Mem Left Processor time
FileMaker Server 85118 79252 91592

Since we have no obvious upgrade path currently, what should we do? The software still does what we need it to do, but now that we have more and more customers using the online interface, we cannot afford to have the server crashing all the time.

Yes, this is the DB server (interal) that is crashing, not the web server, which is separate and works just fine.

How long till we can make the move to SQL?

 

I would take Shawn's advice in upgrading. Even though I am not a OG customer I had the experince of lock ups with OS9. Machines were like yours and they were bad. I thought man Windows is much better. So I did research on the issue and it relates on how OS9 was developed. OS9 was made with no multi-tasking friendly features at all. OS9 has tons of performance issues and bugs. Just IE and Photoshop on OS9 locked our machines up.

 

Odd, never had that problem with Lock ups. We still have OS9 based machines with WebStar, EIMS, etc.. Never a problem. The Web Server portion of OG is on a OS9 based machine and it never crashes. OS9 is extremly stable in my experience. I've been waiting on the migration to OSX for the FM machines with the hopes that a new version of OG would come about. I can build Linux based machines for a 1/5th of the cost and get a lot more bang for the buch. Can I run FM server on linux currently instead?