Hi Firebird devs/users,
I'm considering using Firebird for my next web project, cause I
found that FB supports such thing as stored procedures (non-existent
in mysql). I've successfully set up firebird with apache+php on a
linux box. My problem is the slow speed of opening db-connections
(around 500ms). I found that php has a possibility to have
persistent connections to FB with ibase_pconnect(). But the idle
connections are closed after a couple of hours.

Is there a way to leave idle persistent connections open for a
longer period or is it a problem of PHP implementation. Though, I
could use an ugly solution of creating a script that regularly
queries the database and keeps the connections alive.

Are there some other useful tips when using FB as a web backend? Any
documentation/tutorials for that?
And are there some benchmarks comparing speed of firebird to other
(opensource) databases.

Keep up the good work and thanks,
Jaak