Russell,

> Is it surprising that 200 connections consumes 2000Mb of memory or
> 10Mb per user?

To my mind, yes!

Not necessarily exceptional, but this is the first time that I ever
recall hearing that someone ran "out of memory". {I've used FB/IB since
1995}

> By way of example I have measured my app's memory consumption at the
> FB server (delphi 6, IBO, FB 1.5.1 SuperServer, Win 2K workstation as
> server) using Task manager's "mem usage" for process fbserver.

FYI, task manager is not always the best tool to measure memory usage.

> At rest with no connections fbserver uses 3040Kb.
> 1 bare connection causes fbserver to use 5704Kb more.
> 2 bare connections cause fbserver to use 2096Kb more.
> 3 bare connections cause fbserver to use 920Kb more.
> 4 bare connections cause fbserver to use 544Kb more.
> A "bare connection" means on a client PC I open my app, and a minimal
> datamodule. fbserver seems to share memory?
>
> My app, usually operates on "matters".
> Opening a matter causes fbserver to use 1000Kb.
>
> A user may have many matters open. So assuming fbserver stabilises at
> 600Kb per connection (I have not tried more than 4 connections yet)
> and 1000Kb per matter then N users with M matters open such that
> 600N + 1000M = 2000000 will consume 2Gb.

I believe that your methodology is invalid, you have measured/tested
"start up" conditions not real world -- long term usage.

Your 1000KB for 1 matter, could easily be the memory usage for 10
matters. It depends on the number of database pages which have been
loaded into cache to satisfy the search and read request.

With Superserver, the memory footprint will eventually "nearly" flatten
out, regardless of the number of connections. When you consider that
the single largest memory usage is for the page cache, which will
eventually reach its preset limit/maximum size.


Sean