Update from Jason Young on “What’s Faster?”

At last week’s meeting I presented some FileMaker performance analysis findings that were compiled by Jason Young, Mighty Data (Denver, CO). He had shared them during his session “What’s Faster?” at the recent PauseOnError unconference in Portland, OR a few weeks back. Jason sent a follow-up email about some of his findings and some tidbits he’s learned since Pause On Error, along with the slides from his presentation, which are attached here. If you weren’t at the meeting, check out the meeting video on an earlier post to gain some context for this update (fast forward to the 54:20 mark).

After the presentation at PauseOnError, Jason received some great info from a few FileMaker engineers. Here are the results:

• Regarding loop speeds, freeze window trumps all and looping through a layout set to Form view is the fastest. Even when List and Table view are frozen, they still have to manage more records and are doing some “fetching-ahead” of records not currently being displayed.
• We had discussed that that “Setting Values Through a Portal” performs better than looping through actual records. The reason is that none of the child records are committed as you loop through them. Looping through a found set commits every record when it is exited. But, all portal rows close when the parent record is committed, which means all child records are locked until the process completes and if you revert the parent, you also revert all children records (similar to the Replace command).
• Jason also did some server testing and found that Replace and portal looping were identical. (Locally, replace beat portal looping while setting a single field). So, looping may be the way to go, given the two options, because you can error capture if any records fail.

We are looking forward to hearing more on future performance testing. Thank you Jason for sharing your findings with Philly FileMaker!