Tobias Giesen wrote:

> my customer wants to know whether to buy a dual pentium server. Does this
> make Interbase 6 or Firebird 1 significantly faster in the following
> situation?

If you will be using Windows you will find that Fb (or IB) will not
perform faster. It might well be (impercetbibly?) slower. Using
IB_Affinity (or the new feature of Fb) you can make Fb/IB use just one
of the processors - which is currently your best option (Borland has
announced plans for multiprocessor support in the future, possibly for
IB/7 next year ?????).
However, I recently started using a dual processor server for Fb. Why?
Occasionally I run other tasks on the server (database related, and not
only gbak) and these tasks will use the other processor - an arrangement
that suits us well.

> I have contemplated merging all these small databases into a big one, but
> for practical purposes I prefer them separate. How much of a performance
> loss does this probably cause? Is there a limit to the number of open
> databases at all?

Having several databases can make better use of memory (if you have lots
of RAM). A downside is that joining tables across databases will have
to be done at the client.


Regards,
Aage J.