David,

> In a nutshell, the performance we've seen with superserver (in
> production the past 18 months) has outstripped classic (the prior 4
> years) by a significant margin in a Windows 2000 deployment. The
> comparison has unfortunately been highly informal, and possibly
> completely invalid since our last version change in production was
> from IB 4.2 to FB 1.0, but running on the same hardware.

I would suggest that you have a look at the next Beta release for v1.5
and compare the new classic engine, I think you'll find it performs much
better than v1.0 superserver

> As far as typical server load is concerned, we usually have <= 25
> concurrent database connections (via a web interface), but usually one
> or two of those connections will be doing very large selects
> or inserts.

This would seem to be an ideal environment for Classic, especially under
SMP

> This said, we are in the process of developing an entirely new
> application platform for our products, where we can look at more
> advanced ways of managing database requests (like connection pooling)
> which at this point I know absolutely ZERO about. Know any good
> references I should buy? ;)

You'll be happy to hear that the connect/disconnect times for v1.5 have
been substantially improved. One test showed that 100 connections (to a
SS server) could be openned in less than 2 seconds. Accordingly, I
think that connection polling might not be required.


Sean