> Hello,
> I am looking for decision which Unix is more stable an faster for
> Firebird Database in terms.

> The most important thing for me is stability . I had case in ext3 fs
> Gnu/Linux in work with Firebird my computer lost power and rebooted and
> I got corrupted database.

> The next thing is speed as I understand FreeBSD have only CS server for
> FB not SS.The question CS on FreeBSD and SS on Gnu/Linux be compared on
> the same machine.

(This is not an attempt to start a flame war. I am willing to be proven
wrong by anything contained herin)

As many people on this list know, I'm a big fan of FreeBSD (After using
Linux for a few years up until Kernel 2.2.14)
I was involved in the original port of Firebird to FreeBSD, and we ported
both CS and SS architectures to FreeBSD.
SS simply wasn't worth releasing to the wild (ON THIS PLATFORM) - CS
performed so much better, in both OLTP and OLAP situations. Sure SS has the
shared cache between connections, but it's thread scheduling deficiencies
halt parallel execution of many queries, meaning people are sitting and
waiting for the DB to do something - effectively a DoS attack...

CS, on the other hand, nestles brilliantly into FreeBSD. FreeBSD only loads
a single copy of the executable into RAM, even if it's invocated 50 times.
Each invocation has it's own data space, and then it's own record cache, but
compared to all other platforms, it's very easy on RAM.
FreeBSD also has much lighter Process Context Switching - there's less data
structures to be moved off the execution stack, and back into ram. Thusly,
there's less kernel time swapping processes, and more CPU time to run your
queries.

Stability: We reboot our Linux servers roughly monthly. Most of our FreeBSD
machines have uptimes of over a year.

Network Performance: As Milan said, Linux has drivers for later hardware,
but the big names have the quality gear, and they're all supported.
FreeBSD 6 has phenominal network performance, as (AFAIK) it's been fully
re-implemented using non-blocking Kernel threads, removing the bottlenecks
that plagued 5.x releases and earlier.

> Third thing. Problems with installation which is more easy to setup and
> what is compatibility with Windows OS <-> Linux <-> FreeBSD and other
> problems encountered.

Installing Firebird on FreeBSD goes like this:
(Assuming a freshly installed machine)

`cd /usr/ports/databases/firebird-server/`
`make install`

Done.



Nige.