Data Collection Insights

March 27, 2023 3 min read

Last October 2022, 4D introduced a unique feature called Data collection in 4D v19 R6.

Perhaps the best way to understand how we use this is to show you the questions this feature allows us to answer. So after a few months of watching it run, we’re glad to share some of the interesting insights it gives us.

When we announced that we were about to collect anonymous usage data, several customers asked us if we would share the results with the community. We found that to be a great idea,

Before diving deep into charts and numbers, let’s remember that no personal or company data are collected by anyone. 4D is in no way able to identify any user, developer, or company directly or indirectly. Everything we collect is public, transparent, and documented on https://developer.4d.com/docs/Admin/data-collect/

What you need to know before exploring the results below:

The following figures are only representative of Feature Releases adopters until v20 LTS is available.
This feature is only available on 4D Server, so only data from 4D Server are presented here below.
Data presented here below are data related to deployment licenses.

Project mode

One of the first interesting outcomes is that most customers now work and deploy in Project Mode. With a very high adoption for larger installations counting more than 100 clients, where 80% are running an application in project mode. Still, developing and deploying in binary mode? Did you know you can now develop concurrently on 4D Server in project mode?

Follow this link to read more about 4D projects!

New SERVERNET network layer

Still using the legacy network layer?

Perhaps it is time to reconsider: New network layer is now widely adopted among 4D customers, especially with larger installations, which benefit from better scalability and speed.

Any doubt left? Let’s read these testimonies on 4D Forum showing the kind of performance increase you can achieve.

Operating systems

Interestingly, macOS is more used on server computers than we thought, even on larger installations.

For curious people, here are the top ten operating systems used to run 4D Server.

About Hardware

When 4D Server runs on Apple hardware, 50% of computer servers are based on Apple Silicon.

As a reminder, we discuss hardware used as server computer here, as we do not have data for clients.

Regarding RAM: 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB are the most frequent. Still we can observe a significant amount of 4GB servers.

Regarding CPU, Cores: 4, 6, and 8 are the most frequent. But here again, smaller setups with only 2 cores can be noticed.

Conclusion

So – what do we learn?

Project mode is quickly adopted, no big surprise.

The fact that most large installations moved to a new network layer validates our significant investment in developing and troubleshooting network operations.

The high usage of macOS to run 4D Server shows us that it was necessary to invest early in Silicon/ARM support and validates that we should continue to invest in macOS as a server system in the future.

While hardware results, such as 16 GB as median server memory, is no surprise, the numbers show that small configurations, such as 4 GB or 2 cores, are significantly used, usually as a virtual machine in hosting environments. Such information helps us to avoid focusing only on large computer configurations.

We will publish another blog post with updated figures with new insights when 4D v20 LTS is shipped!