At 12:43 PM 07-03-02 +0000, you wrote:

>Good Morning!
>
> I am new to this list, so if this has already been answered,
>please point me to the answer.
>
> In a production environment, I am using Firebird RC2. I moved to
>RC2 because the IB6 engine messed up my generator values, starting
>with the 126th generator. Because of that, I had not been able to do
>a backup/restore for many months (since moving to IB6) and the
>indexes were way out of balance. The performance was really bad. Some
>transactions were taking minutes to complete.
>
> The upgrade went OK.
>
> I also tried (and am still trying) several of the recommended
>tuning options. So far, performance is still baaaaaaad!
>
> I have set the number of page buffers to 65535, increased the page
>size to 4K and 8K, set the processing priority to 2, used ib_affinity
>to set the cpu to 1, set SERVER_WORKING_SIZE_MIN to 300MB and
>SERVER_WORKING_SIZE_MAX to 500MB (1 GB in server). Nothing seems to
>help.
>
> I use the NT perfomance counters to watch IBServer. It is
>frequently maxed out at the top (flatlined!)
>
> I have included an external DCOM app to monitor what the main app
>is doing (reports, grids, forms). When several resource hungry
>reports are requested at the same time, I can see that the engine is
>maxed out.
>
> The app is using TTables (not my idea, someone else wrote the
>app). I have tried to make sure that all tables and queries are
>closed when the app starts and when the forms (~600 of them) are
>created.
>
> The owner is pulling her hair out and is ready to trash the whole
>thing and buy something else.
>
> What else can I try? What can I look at to find the problem?

Well, if you are using TTables, that's where to start looking. Get rid of
the BDE first, then get rid of the TTables. Then you can begin to address
your undoubted architectural problems, network issues, unsuitable or
missing indexes, etc.

And..600 forms????????? Your problem is not a database tuning one...I fear
the major part of your solution won't come from this list (which is about
the database and its language -SQL - which is not even a factor in your
app) but from a list that supports Delphi programming.

What's being used to connect your tables to the database? are the ttables
doing it through a tdatabase, or are they each making their own connections
via an alias? (That one is a killer for databases - it was designed for
ODBC datasources - excel spreadsheets & the like).

If you are going to program for a client/server database, there is NO WAY
you can avoid SQL.

Helen

All for Open and Open for All
Firebird Open SQL Database · http://firebirdsql.org
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