Andy,

The dual Xeon processors are going to look like four processors to
the machine due to Hyperthreading. You can lock the FB process to a
single processor thru the config file, but my vote is to go with the
Classic version. I've got the same setup here (dual Xeon), and have
seen a dramatic improvement in responsiveness for multi-users. Prior
to this, I was running Superserver, and was seeing great delays in
servicing of other users while one user ran some lengthy query or
report.

As far as the drive configuration - I haven't worked with an
external storage array before. However, I would move the FB sort dir
to the array as well. It's going to be much faster than putting it on
the system partition. See the TempDirectories setting in
Firebird.conf to make this change.

Bob M..

> -----Original Message-----
> From: milkyyyyy [mailto:a.murphy@...]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 2004 9:16 AM
> To: firebird-support@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [firebird-support] Firebird Speed Issues
>
>
>
> Dear List,
>
> We have just bought a new workstation and separate managed
> RAID unit to run our FB server on.
>
> Im trying to maximize the speed of FB using this config but
> first I would like to know a very basic thing.
>
> In the past we had FB 1.5 running on a dual Xeon with Raid 0
> and 8 U160 SCSI Drives. It was running Windows XP SP2. We
> have had constant problems with this all in one box so we are
> moving to the above solution.
>
> I would ideally like to keep windows xp on the single hard drive
> (U320) on the Workstation as I have heard running Windows
> Kernel accross a RAID can cause problems. I dont want to
> suffer from an FB point of view which is why we have splashed
> out on this gear to begin with.
>
> Am I right in saying that if I shift the windows page file
> over to the raid disk entirely and keep the FB databases on
> the raid then the fact that windows is on the much slower
> single drive wont matter?
>
> Also do i need to shift the temp folder where fb stores its
> sort files over to the raid too? (and how do I do this?).
>
> Any other thoughts over what raid level to use (we are
> thinking 10 right now) and how we might maximise FB's
> throughput would be welcome.
>
> We have approx 28 million records in five databases that need
> to be constantly updated and take a while to do. The
> workstation is 2 x
> 3.6 Xeons with two channel U320 Card in a PCI-x 133 slot, 2
> gb of memory. The raid is a 14 drive U320 with 36gb U320
> drives. Most of our databases have a page file size of 8192
> and we use database workbench to do all our work. Our apps
> are IBO powered.
>
> PS. Since the workstation is a dual processor again (which
> means I can carry on working as per normal while FB is flat
> out!) should I install the classic server instead of super
> server? There will only be one person logged into the FB
> server at one time so is this a benefit by using both xeons?
>
> Many thanks for any info you can give!
>
> Andy.
>
>
>
>
>
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