Hi Adam,

Thanks a lot for the advice and the clear clarification

Regards,
Tom.

--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, "Adam" <s3057043@...> wrote:
>
> > Is it possible to use a firebird 32bit build on a 64bit Win2003
server?
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOW64
>
> Mind you, you would probably want an AMD processor so your code is
> running native x86 32 bit calls rather than going through a 32 bit
> emulation layer on 64 bit.
>
> > The only place I would see the need to go 64 bit
> > > is the process memory limit (2GB), which can be worked around using
> > > Classic Server.
> >
> > Can you clarify this more? thanks!
>
> (2^(32-1))-1 = 2147483647 = 2GB.
>
> That is the amount of RAM you can address with a signed 32 bit number.
> I think there is a hack to allow you to use up to 3 GB, but that
> involves a boot switch.
>
> Remember when we went 32 bit in the first place, the idea of 2GB of
> storage was huge, let alone a computer with that much RAM, let alone a
> single process consuming all of it.
>
> The superserver engine uses a single process to do everything with
> different threads managing the different tasks. This allows
> connections to share cache data etc. But start making a lot of
> connections to a lot of different databases (managed by the same
> superserver process) with large caches, and you will find that you
> start to head towards this limit.
>
> Classic resolves this because each connection gets its own process, so
> with classic your limit is 2GB per connection rather than 2GB for all
> connections.
>
> The disk addressing is already 64 bit, so there is no problem with
> file size under NTFS or any other modern file systems (until your file
> hits a few hundred terabytes).
>
> Adam
>