Why Dedicate a computer as a FileMaker Pro Server?

SumWare Consulting always recommend that clients using a FileMaker Pro Server based arrangement dedicate a computer to run FileMaker Pro Server. That means the same computer will not be hosting web files, acting as a file server and so on.

The TechInfo article below comes from FileMaker Inc and explains some of the reasoning behind this recommendation.

Tech Info Article # 101295:

"Optimizing Network Performance for Shared Databases": HOST THE DATABASES ON A COMPUTER RUNNING ONLY FILEMAKER PRO

You can host databases on a server, on a workstation or on a separate computer dedicated to hosting FileMaker databases. A dedicated FileMaker Pro host is fastest. This is because a computer can only process one thing at a time. A computer may appear to process multiple tasks at the same time. In fact, the computer can only switch between processing different tasks very quickly. Any computer processing time used for something else is processing time taken away from running FileMaker Pro. On a server, processing time can be used for transferring files to and from the server, processing mail, print serving, web serving, running other applications, etc. When the server is busy handling these other processes, it cannot handle processing FileMaker Pro. This can cause delays for FileMaker Pro users as they wait for the server to process other requests on the server.

Similar delays can happen when you host the databases on your workstation. For example, if you work on a word processing document while FileMaker Pro is hosting files in the background, you may find that the computer processing time for the word processing document slows down FileMaker Pro, and vice versa. Likewise, dialog boxes and screen savers may prevent the workstation from doing any processing of background applications *at all*, bringing all FileMaker Pro users to a complete halt.

For these reasons, the fastest solution is to host FileMaker Pro databases on a dedicated host computer. If you cannot afford a separate computer to run FileMaker Pro, then hosting the databases on the server is still better than storing databases on the server and hosting from a workstation. This, at least, eliminates any network between the host and the database files.

Macintosh tip: when hosting on a non-dedicated server, FileMaker Pro (or FileMaker Pro Server) should be the foreground application. They run much more slowly when they are background applications. This is because they are written to be "friendly" applications when run concurrently with other applications, not forcing other applications to wait while they "hog" the CPU.