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Delayed start of FileMaker Pro

Sometimes we get queries about whether our plugin may slow down FileMaker Pro starting and we like to show you various ways the startup of FileMaker may be slower than usual:

Certificates

FileMaker tries to verify the code signature of the plugin via Windows API calls. Windows itself wants to refresh the certificates every week and does a network query to do so. This fails and after a few seconds, it gives up and continues doing the verify with the certificates on disk. If you turn the Wifi/LAN off and start FileMaker offline, it may be much faster to do so. In that case you may want to check firewall to let Windows contact it's update server to refresh the certificates once. Then the start time should be back to normal for a while.

Recent files

Your recent files list references a network drive, so FileMaker may look for that drive on startup, which may take time and maybe time out.

FileMaker Login

FileMaker tries to login to Claris/FileMaker ID and that times out if the required domain is not reachable. Make sure filemaker.com, claris.com and ifmcloud.com domains are reachable.

Notarization

MacOS Ventura may check regularly whether an app is still valid. So it checks code signature and notarization state. You may have seen people with FileMaker Pro updated with the in-app updater. If the updater updates the files and the code signature, but misses to remove an older file, which is no longer needed, the check later will fail. And then you get a message telling you to throw the app away and download a new copy.
Performing these checks takes time, but should only happen on a macOS upgrade.

Data Sources

You have an external data source or a link to another FileMaker database somewhere, which it tries to connect to on open and that could time out after a while.

Startup database

FileMaker is configured with a startup database, which may be on a network share or on a remote server, which may be slow to connect to.

DNS

If you are connected to a network, but your DNS server doesn't respond, FileMaker may wait for it in some cases. Either be offline or be online. But between that with connected to a local network, where DNS server does not answer may be very bad.


Here you got several possible issues and usually the plugin is not at fault. We can measure on macOS, that plugin initialization needs about 20ms. And that happen about 700ms after FileMaker started its initialization.

On Windows, FileMaker seems to take about 4 seconds to launch here with or without plugin. Plugin initialization starts about one second into this and takes about 50ms in our testing. With network connected, it seems to take a bit longer, so FileMaker may try to do some network queries, e.g. DNS lookups.

22 03 23 - 08:42