A WebDirect deployment can have up to 5 or 10 worker servers where the user’s sessions will live. The main FileMaker Server will route incoming sessions to the healthy workers to balance the load across those workers.
In our Soliant.cloud environment, we can spin up and spin down those workers dynamically based on the total number of WebDirect clients; we are the only FileMaker hosting provider that has this capability.
In recent weeks, we discovered a bug in how Claris implemented that routing. It leads to all routing attempts being stalled when one of the worker servers becomes unresponsive. We are working with Claris to resolve the bug, but in the meantime, we have implemented our own routing based on a thorough understanding of how Claris’ mechanism is supposed to work. It helps, of course, if we have wizards like Karl Jreijiri and Mike Duncan on your team to make figuring this out easy.
With our deployment, any unresponsive worker will remain alive until all of its sessions expire, new incoming sessions are properly routed to the available workers, and a new replacement worker is automatically added.
So, if you want a robust, dynamic, and cost-effective WebDirect deployment, there is only one place to go: soliant.cloud.
