Hi,

Apologies if I'm asking a question that has been asked before but I
couldn't locate the answer in the archives...

I'm studying ways to improve the performance of a large Firebird
database (>15GB) and was wondering what I can do. I've increased the
memory allocation (see Firebird) parameters below) but it seems a single
classic Firebird server instance/process won't allocate more than 1GB of
memory...

Would it make sense to use a raw disc device (ie. for instance
/dev/sda11) instead of a filing system on that partition? A book about
Linux tuning suggests to use "raw" devices, however it seems raw devices
have become obsolete in the 2.6 series kernels: according to the
documentation it would suffice to open the file /dev/sda11 with the
O_DIRECT flag. But since I have no way telling Firebird to open
/dev/sda11 with that flag...

Usually there's only 1 user running queries...

Any ideas/suggestions are welcome!

thanks,
Jan

Relevant Firebird parameters in /etc/firebird2/firebird.conf

DefaultDbCachePages = 819200
SortMemBlockSize = 1073741824
SortMemUpperLimit = 4294967296

OS: Linux Debian Sarge, kernel 2.6.15.1
RAM: 8GB
HD: Hardware RAID5 SATA, 4 discs