At 02:39 AM 17/12/2004 +0000, you wrote:

>I wanted to know how FB 1.5.1 works on multi-processor machine with
>Win2k.
>
>My Client is using a Machine with following config.
>1) Win2K
>2 1 CPU Xeon 2.0Ghz (I plan to ask them to add 2nd processor. Is that
>going to add to performance? As far as I know IB 6.0.2 does not work
>fine on multi-processor machine).

InterBase 6.0, and Firebird up to and including 1.5, can not make use of a
second processor "to add performance". For Superserver, you have to keep
the CPU affinity set to one specific processor. If possible, you should
set the affinity of other apps being served from the same host, e.g.
another database server, or a web server, to avoid the CPU that Firebird SS
uses.

Classic is more "SMP friendly" - a process will go where the OS sends it
and multiple Classic processes run alongside each other comfortably. The
Firebird 1.5 server software cannot be said to "support SMP", however,
since its current threading model is unaware of multiple processors.

>3) 1GB RAM (I plan to add another 1GB. I know this will make a
>difference:).

It will. Database servers love RAM.

>Application is Client-Server. When no. of users increase on current
>version of IB 6.0.2, performace decreases rapidly.

This is common where you have a poorly resourced machine as your server, or
one that is not configured well to take advantage of the resources it has;
or you have application code that consumes a lot of server resource
unnecessarily.

> I am upgrading to
>FB 1.5.1, I hope this issue will be resolved to some extent.

To some extent, insofar as Fb 1.5 uses RAM for sorting, instead of disk
files, if it has RAM available; and queries may prepare faster, due to
some indexing done on the system tables. However, you will not get the
benefit of this indexing if you have never restored your database under 1.5.

There's often room for improvement in application code, of course, even to
fix performance problems on IB 6! :-))

A lot of work has been done in Fb 1.5 on optimizing your SQL statements, so
you should look forward to improvements in query speed.

./heLen