We are building a thematic collection of FileMaker expertise focused on performance and usability.
Our first project is on the performance of vanilla FileMaker including a limited range of relevant plugins.
We are consolidating the accumulated knowledge into a series of summaries which may become technical advice notes.
Please support these projects by adding your knowledge to our accumulated wisdom. Don’t hold back if you think we are going wrong, give your view and try to provide examples.
Reviewing progress and participation in this project over the 2 months or so it has run to date it was interesting to observe which were the most popular topics:
- Unstored calculations: 336 views & 41 contributions
- Scripting: 278 views & 24 contributions.
I would suggest that not enough attention is being paid to Indexing (43 views) and Startup (37 views).
Topic 2. Indexing has a big negative effect if not properly controlled.
Topic 6: Slow startup is a really effective method of commencing a poor user experience. I have been mentoring a developer recently who used the ideas that we discussed to improve the startup speed of one part of his long established and mission critical system from 7 seconds to 1 second. I merely helped him change the way he thought about what he was doing and how his system worked. This enabled him to create his own improved, and much more performant design, for this part of his system.
Nick Lightbody
11/03/2021
