A few months ago we had the fun experience of watching FileMaker Server repeatedly crash and become unresponsive. This occurred randomly over a 2-3 month time period and we began to question the reliability of the server and we checked all hardware components
The symptom of the problem would be that users would get disconnected and the databases seemed just really slow. They would connect back into the database and continue working and on the admin console of the server it would show them with 4 or 5 connections, even if they were not really even there.
At this point the server would not respond to closing the files either from the command line or the admin console. Users could still work in the hosted databases but without fail the FileMaker Server would crash and create a .dmp file. The only way to get the it back was to reboot the entire server. Even stopping the service failed.
FileMaker Priority Support had no answers. Every time this occurred we reviewed all windows logs, FileMaker logs, Stats, Task Manager processes for clues. No smoking gun. There was something that seem to point to the network where FileMaker was waiting on clients but this is normal when users are disconnected.
We became more and more suspect of a network issue and the break came one day when we were reviewing that latest crashing and questioning everyone an their activities. Users complained that everything seemed slow. After questioning the users an system admin we piece a few more clues together and it finally came to light that about 2-3 months ago they move a phone system from the WAN side of their internet connection to the LAN. The phone system was flooding the WAN side so the Phone system engineers had the bright idea of moving the machine to the LAN so it wouldn’t affect the WAN connections. How someone can think that bringing a faulty system in house will fix the problem is beyond us.
As soon as we unplugged the phone system completely to confirm that this indeed was the culprit, users over the next 2 days asked the COO if they upgraded the internet because everything was so fast.
Problem solved and FileMaker Server was again stable and working as expected.
MyDBSolutions
Certified FileMaker Pro Developers