There are multiple issues impacting your measures.

The Vulcan rewrite addresses many of the internal coding issues that are
a result of 20 years accumulation of the approaches of various
companies' that owned the product prior to its release to the open
source market. Preliminary measures have it performing about 4 times as
fast as current firebird releases.

Which model of connection was used (classic, superserver, or embedded)?

Did your stress tests include a suite of concurrency tests?

The Firebird wire protocol is known to be excessively chatty. Resolving
this without breaking prior versions is an ongoing discussion on the
firebird architecture list. For queries returning small datasets, you
may be spending a large amount of time transmitting what I call "chit-
chat".

The row level generational architecture imposes some overheads, but
guarantees nearly absolute transaction isolation.

One of the impacts of a generational architecture is that inserts are
cleaner than with locking systems, but selects can be slower since it is
not possible to do an index-only scan. A generational system is
preferred for systems that mostly insert rows (journaling accounting
systems), whereas a locking system performs better where you are mostly
retrieving data (data warehousing).

Hope this helps.

On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 12:15 +0000, laurenz_brein wrote:
> I have run stress tests against Firebird and a handful of other
> Database Management Systems, and I have made the following
> observations:
>
> - For insert, update & delete, the performance was EXCELLENT
> and no worse than for big commercial DBMS
> - For simple selects, the performance was worse than for any
> other DBMS tested.
> (in both cases, use of primary key indexes was made, e.g.
> SELECT/UPDATE ... WHERE ID = ?)
>
> - Also, for operations that require index scans or full table scans,
> the performance was 10 times as bad as for the worst competitor.
>
> I post this because I am curious if somebody can explain results like
> that: does Firebird use some kind of indexes that would explain such
> a behaviour?
> I used the out-of-the-box configuration of Firebird: was that a
> mistake?
> Any other clues?
>
> Thank you,
> Laurenz Albe
>
>
>
>
>
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
> Visit http://firebird.sourceforge.net and click the Resources item
> on the main (top) menu. Try Knowledgebase and FAQ links !
>
> Also search the knowledgebases at http://www.ibphoenix.com
>
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
>