At 11:59 AM 6/27/2001 +0000, loucks@... wrote:

>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.

No, it will, in theory, allow 64K pages, where a page ranges from
1 - 16 K. However, the optimal number of cached database pages
seems to be less than 10K, and in some cases much less.

>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).

You'd be better off, I think, putting it on a ram disk and letting
InterBase pretend that it's reading from a real disk. I don't know
what causes the problem with large caches, just that it exists.

>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.

The right answer is to sweep when the difference between the oldest
active transaction and the oldest interesting is greater than 15,000,
unless that requires sweeping more often than nightly and your performance
is OK,


Regards,

Ann
www.ibphoenix.com
We have answers.