On Fri, 2005-07-15 at 00:25 +0000, Maurice Ling wrote:

> 2. FB's CPU usage almost never drop and is always so high. Shouldn't
> it be a blip of FB usage, followed by a blip of Python usage, and so
> on? As in FB reads, python process, FB reads/writes...... Shouldn't FB
> is doing nothing when data is out for processing?

In a single threaded world, this would be true. The world of the
commodity servers began multi-threading a long time ago. By connecting
locally via a TCP/IP connection to the classic server, you are talking
asynchronously from process to process.

Helen or Ann will correct me on this ... When your app is not using the
database is when Firebird can garbage collect and tune itself.

More important, I believe, is that the resolution of CPU measurements on
commodity server platforms is very poor. If you have optimized your
application code to stream the data into the DBMS, and you are spending
sufficiently small increments of time in you app, then the OS will
register that the DBMS is utilizing the lion's share of the CPU.

aside: A mysql user suggesting that Firebird is not a "real" RDBMS?
mysql doesn't support two phase commits (performance versus
reliability), and only qualifies as relational if you take the minimum
possible requirements and twist them a bit to the left. Firebird is a
very different architecture, but it is almost (_almost_) a drop-in
replacement for DB2, and its commercial predecessor was originally
architected and marketed to compete directly with Oracle.