There has been a little thread on the developers list relating to the Linux
file system, or rather the location of files within that tree when installing
Firebird. During that discussion a couple of other points were made which I
think are worth a more general discussion ...

Working on the theory that people involved here are actually USING Firebird to
manage data in an SQL format, the question has to be, which OS/file system is
best?

Of cause it's a 'how long is a piece of string?' type question, and I'm sure
there are probably more answers than there are people reading this. However,
it would be nice to pin down a few real facts in this matter. And build up a
better picture of the real situation on the ground.

I'm sure that it would be generally agreed that Linux is preferable over
Windows for a dedicated server, especially where the Linux box does not have
any graphical interface installed. Which distribution to use is probably
academic at that point, since the core stuff will be the generic kernel,
however questions about which version of kernel is prefered come up, with a
statement that version 2.6 earlier than 2.6.26 have problems - something that
I was not aware of and if this affects Firebird, might explain why I have
occasional connection loss on a couple of Linux boxes? Having pinned down the
version of kernel, which disk format is preferable for storing the database,
and would partitioning and formating using different formats help, along with
multiple hard disks?

Adding a 'desktop' to the Linux box opens another can of worms, which it's not
worth discussing here except to say that some factions of Linux development
seem hell bent on emulating the mistakes of M$ and creating an unusable user
interface ;) It would seem that the 'make changes for changes sake' attitude
prevails, and older stable set-ups are now being damaged rather than being
ring fenced :(

Windows has a number of inherent problems since there is no option but to have
a graphical interface, and with many of my own customers still stuck with W2k
on many client machines, along with the stupid restriction that IE6 is all
that they have available, just what is best as a server in this environment.
I've been lucky on a few sites that the 'windows only' restriction has now be
dropped, but I've got a vista64/AMD dual core machine running with Firebird,
and Apache/PHP which is my prefered 'interface', and to be honest I'm seeing
poorer performance on that than the older and slower W2k machine that runs my
backup web site. In practice, would the cost of a newer windows server licence
actually provide any better performance? Or would sticking with W2kServer
actually be a better choice - considering that the security problems are
handled by only accessing the machine via Apache and Firebird?

Having convinced sites that allowing me to install Linux servers is the right
way forward, the money saved on windows licences more than covers the cost of
dropping in multiple machines, so Firebird can have it's own hardware, and one
or more Apache/PHP servers can handle the user interface, but what is the best
way of assesing where the bottlenecks are once you start to run multiple
machines? Since in many cases the data is only read, would it actually make
more sense to put copies of Firebird on each web server, and replicate any
write operations? Or is a nice quad core machine just running Firebird a
better option? In my own case I'm still at the sub 500Mb database stage, so
with 4 or 8Gb of memory, all the data is probably already cached?

--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
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