On 15 Nov 2001, at 12:58, Stan Eisenberg wrote:

> Thanks Paul,
>
> I considered that as an option (actually an upgrade for the next
> version of my app), but that introduces too much cost into the
> product.
>
> In order to keep from going bust, it is necessary that I also be able
> to include it as something that can be run on a pre-existing computer.
>
> I started this project because my clientelle are being ripped off by
> the competition. My goal is to provide a superior alternative at a
> significantly cheaper cost -- thus Win support is a necessity.
> Consider this my one good dead for this decade! ;-)
>
> To make things worse, the target audience is not the most computer
> savvy of people -- usually their secretaries are the ones that use the
> program. Because of that I need to refrain from Linux as the "base
> case" as 99.9% of them will have no idea how to use it and would not
> be willing to purchase a support agreement for an extra price.
>
> Aside from the sys restore feature, which I've already disabled, there
> should really be no reason for the 20-30 sec delay for registering and
> connecting to databases.
>
> Since it's local, the network should not be an issue... leaving me
> completely confused as to what is causing this.
>
> For the meantime, it is now looking like I will have to release this
> product without XP compatibility until I can figure out what is wrong,
> but I am worried that this will alienate the people who went to
> BestBuy and were forced to get XP pre-installed (that's the kind of
> people my target audience is).
>
> I've found many posts on usenet from people who said that it works
> correctly after sys restore was disabled, but that is not my case.
>
> At this point, I'm wondering if IB is having SMP issues with XP as
> that seems to be one factor that seperates my developement machine
> from the machines with successful IB/XP installs.

Hold the phone, stop the presses, SMP?, if your running a recent
version of Interbase (6.0, or Firebird) you need to set the CPU
Affinity on Windows for it to work properly. Here is the problem
(short version) Windows has an almost brain dead task switcher, it
keeps bouncing the task from one CPU to another, because it can't
balance a single-threaded application across CPUs, so it sees that
CPU0 is at 100% and CPU1 is at 5% so it switches IB from CPU0
to CPU1, but then the load is CPU0 0% and CPU1 100% so it
switches it back, so it starts to look like good evenly matched
tennis, with IB being the ball. Linux doesn't suffer from this
problem, because the task switcher realises that the load is
coming from one thread, so is willing to live with one CPU seeing
most of the load.

There is a program to fix this, so that under Windows it uses only
one thread, however Windows 9x/ME/NT/2K should all have seen
this problem, given dual processors.

> If so, this has to be XP related, because my other devel machine

runs

> SMP Win2K, with instant registers and connections.
>

There is a program to fix this, so that under Windows it uses only
one thread, however Windows 9x/ME/NT/2K should all have seen
this problem, given dual processors. It may be that XP is more
sensitive to it, or that the problem has always been there, just the
older machine made it less visible. I beleive the latest Firebird has
the CPU AFFINITY built in.

Paul
Paul Schmidt
Tricat Technologies
paul@...
www.tricattechnologies.com