> -----Original Message-----
> From: loucks@... [mailto:loucks@...]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2001 8:00 AM

>
> I have looked through the archives and haven't seen anything that
> really answers the question of buffers. Some of the information I
> have read on the internet leads me to believe that Interbase will
> only allow 64MB to be buffered.
>
> I have a server with 1 GB of mem and a db that is only 600 MB... It
> seems to me that if I cached the whole thing, it would be pretty fast
> but I need to know if the system limits me to 64MB... (Page size is 8
> K).
>

At the moment common wisdom is that you should define a database cache
size of less than 10,000 pages -- there are reported performance
decreases above that size. In your case this would mean a maximum cache
of approx. 80Mb.

Any left over memory, should be used by the server for it's own caching
functions. So it is possible for the entire database could be
effectively cached, but this depends on a number of OS settings/factors.

The latest Firebird has support for database page sizes of 16kb, which
would allow for a cache of 160Mb. The larger page size can also improve
raw database performance, but this also depends on a number of factors
including your server disk configuration.

> Also, I know that in previous versions, I should set the sweep
> interval to 0 and do it manually but I would like some input as to
> whether to do it nightly, weekly, or monthly. I'm not sure what
> statistics would be relevant here, but the database is used by a call
> center, so there are a lot of inserts, updates and selects, but in
> comparison almost no deletes.
>

Yes, set your sweep interval to 0 and let your nightly GBAK perform the
sweep/garbage collection at that time.


Sean