--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, Yves Glodt <yves@s...> wrote:

> David Johnson wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 23:09 +0000, Adam wrote:
> >
> >>--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, "Eduardo A. Salgado"
> >><eas@o...> wrote:
> >>
> >>>--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, Carlos Ortiz Quiros
> >>><carlosaortiz@y...> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>Hie you all.
> >>>>I would like you tell me your experiences about the
> >>>>number of concurrent users FB can support, and how
> >>>>many resources does it take?
> >>>
> >>>Carlos,
> >>>
> >>>According to The Firebird Book, the limit per server is 1,024.
> >>>
> >>>-Eduardo
> >>
> >>Sort of,
> >>
> >>I think you will find that is the limit of concurrent

connections. With

> >>connection pooling and a proper n tier model, you should be able

to

> >>handle significantly more than that. I am sure David may have a

good 2c

> >>on the issue
> >>
> >
> > I always have 2c, and sometimes non-c too. :o)
> >
> > While do have immediate first hand experience with large scale

systems,

> > and I am very interested in scaling Firebird, my experience with

large

> > scale Firebird installations is still theoretical. :o(
> >
> > Many systems are bound by the number of available sockets. Using

a good

> > mid-tier with an appropriately sized connection pool, you can
> > conceptually handle many thousand times that number of concurrent

users

> > that the database layer will directly support. Whether or not

you can

> > physically handle that is another question.
> >
> > The system I normally work on is considered large by most

standards - we

> > support roughly 8,000 real-time users and some unspecified number

of

> > real-time and batch processes. We run over 1,000,000

transactions per

> > hour at peak times.
>
> Thanks for you answer David. Would you trust this to FB (v2)? If

yes, on

> which hardware?

I, personally, trust Firebird as much as any commercial platform.
However, past experience has taught me that I never trust anything
without extensive testing - especially if it comes with a glossy
brochure.

V2 is in beta now, but once it is the mainstream version I would
trust it as well as current versions. That is, I would set it up,
identify weak points, and build testcases to hammer on those weak
points until I was satisfied that it wouldn't break.

Hardware for this scale of operation must be tuned to the specific
application, so my opinion here must be taken with a large bag of
salt.

For my application, Firebird compiled for current generation IBM
processors (P5?) running under linux on a 9000 series application
server with a 10G fiber channel SAN DASD would be the place I would
start, if I were looking for something of this scale and had decided
to use Firebird.

Other applications might benefit more from a more distributed
architecture.

I don't know how far along the build for the current generation IBM
platform is, or even if it got started - I only remember that someone
brought up not too long ago that IBM had opened a competition for
open source ports, and I believe that Jim was interested in following
up on it with a build of Firebird (the offer of lots of $$$ for the
winning contenders comes to mind).