2023 Upgrade experiences?

1

I work with a number of schools and it's hard to update server and client's mid-school year, so the best times are summer and winter break.

I'm leaning towards just upgrading all my clients and their servers to the lastest version of filemaker (2023), but I'm always a little cautious about making a change to major versions. Does anyone have good or bad stories to share about the 2023 update? Stability issues? Speed issues? Smooth sailing?

I don't know of any specific features I need now for any clients, but if there's something I want to use mid-year it's a pain so I usually go up to the latest-greatest every summer and unless there's a critical security issue or bug don't try to do any mid-year updates for the schools since their IT departments are so behind the times.

2

We have not upgraded our work or client versions to 2023 yes we are still on 19. I have been testing 2023 at home and so far it has worked without issue.

I do seem to recall the server and the work stations need to be on the same 2023 version. I can not recall what I tried first I think it was installing 2023 on my computer and then realized I needed to update the server? It might have been the other way I forget. In the past I have not ran into this issue so it seemed notable.

3

Our system is in use in hundreds of locations and they are all running the current version. No issues that we’ve found.

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4

Thanks, super helpful!

5

I encountered pretty bad performance issues when moving from FMS18 (Intel) to FMS19 (M1) - an almost 10x slowdown in some procedures. But I didn't see other people reporting this, so I figured it might just be a quirk of my databases?

See FMS19.6.3 poor performance on M1 mini / Ventura

Very curious to see if anyone has had performance deltas (positive or negative) with version 20.

6

As an aside back in 17 or 18 we moved to Linux from Windows and it was faster at some things, but overall slower, and was dragging and needed restarting every couple of weeks so we moved back to Windows. We haven't tried moving back to Linux/Unix.

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7

To update this thread:

Re: the 10x slowdown I was seeing in FMS19, the root cause has been found and there are several workarounds: FMS19.6.3 poor performance on M1 mini / Ventura - #31 by xochi

Re: updating to FMS20:

  • I updated two servers (M1 Minis) from FMS19.6.3 on Ventura 13.6.3
  • I first updated FMS to 20.3.1 and ran tests
  • then I updated macOS to Sonoma 14.2.1

Both servers updated to 20.3.1 perfectly, and one updated to Sonoma without trouble.

However, when I updated the second server to Sonoma, it appears as if the 'fmserver' user was lost, which resulted in a variety of problems. The solution was to re-install FMS 20.3.1 a second time, and then manually update the file permissions in a few places (external backup folder, plugin files, etc.)

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