Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie we will concentrate on the Databases Section of the FileMaker Server Admin Console. The Database Information Screen has two panes. The top one shows all of the files and their folder structure and the bottom one gives more detailed information about the connective clients. Now, you can perform a number of actions from here, either by selecting it from the Actions Menu or by selecting any one file or a number of files and right clicking and choosing your action. You can send a message to anyone that is connected to a file or a group of files. You can pause or close a file. You can open it if the status is set to Closed. Uploading a removing a file was added in FileMaker Server 9. Version 10 has the ability to verify a file, to run a consistency check on it. Note however that FileMaker Server will need to kick off any connective clients to perform this action. FileMaker Server will close the file, run the check and then reopen it, as we can see in the log file. As you can see here, the file was closed. Then the consistency check was run and it was successful and then the file was opened again. When you remove a file, close it first, then choose Remove and that action will prompt FileMaker Server to take the file and put it in a folder named Remove by FMS, which is by itself a sub-folder of the folder named Removed in FileMaker's Database Folder. Let's verify that. This is the machine that FileMaker Server is running on and this is where we have FileMaker's Databases Folder. This is where the files usually are when they are hosted and right here there's a Remove by FMS folder and a sub-folder named Removed and that's where we will find the file that we've just removed. That folder structure may seem a bit odd, but remember that FileMaker Server will automatically try to host every file that's in the Database Folder and one folder down from there. The Removed Folder is two folders down from the Database Folder. So that puts it out of FileMaker's reach to automatically host. Uploading a file is covered in a separate movie. It's a great method of moving a file to FileMaker Server and have it open automatically. OS X has the added benefit of making sure that the privileges are set correctly. Note that you can also send a message to all clients that are connected to a file, but that applies only to FileMaker Pro guests. Web clients won't see any message. After you add or remove a file or make any other change that would affect the list of files or folders here, you may need to refresh the view before you'll see the changes in the Admin Console. The folders you see here and the list depend on how you set up FileMaker Server. Any sub-folders that you've set up in the default FileMaker Server Databases Location will show up here and also any files and sub-folders in the initial database location that you can choose in the setup. See the separate movie on folder locations in this tutorial for more information. Let's have a look at the Databases Tab in the Configuration Area. We know that FileMaker Server can host up to 125 files. Out of the box, FileMaker Server is configured to allow 50 files. You can adjust this up or down as you need and you might ask, why not set it to the max value of 125 and forget about it? The answer is the same like for setting the maximum number of users, namely stability and performance. The higher the setting, the more memory FileMaker Server will grab and the higher you will need to set the cache. Best practice is to set it slightly higher than the number of files you really need. Also remember that all the changes you make in this tab are applied immediately. You don't need to restart FileMaker Server for a change to take hold. So when you move your files in and then use the Admin Console to open them up, you can easily adjust the setting without having to kick off any of the other guests. The most important setting in this Database Tab is the cache. The cache is that part of your hosted files that FileMaker Server keeps in memory so it can be accessed faster than having to read from and write to the hard disk. So higher cache typically means better performance. But that doesn't mean you should up the cache to whatever maximum it allows. There are two trade-offs; whatever is in the cache could be lost if FileMaker Server or the machine on it crashes. That is a risk you can minimize by using a dedicated machine with quality server hardware and redundancy built in it. But it's still a risk you need to consider. The second trade-off is in diminishing returns. There is an optimal point after which adding one megabyte to the cache will not increase performance anymore and adding more memory might even decrease performance. Where that optimum point is depends on how your solution is designed, how many people use it, how people use it and the exact hardware and software deployments. In the video chapters about monitoring, we'll help you find that particular threshold. FileMaker Server will tell you what the maximum amount of RAM is that you can use for the cache. It's in direct relation to the physical amount of RAM that's installed, but it has a hard maximum as the pane describes, no matter how many gigs of RAM you install in the machine. And it goes somewhat like this. You have the physical RAM that is installed in your machine. FileMaker Server reserves 128 megabytes for any other process, for the operating system, for anything else on the machine. Of whatever is remaining of the physical RAM, FileMaker divides that by four and that is the maximum that FileMaker Server will be able to use on your machine and it has a minimum of 64 megabytes and a fixed maximum of 800 megabytes.