Hello,

We have a .NET desktop application which uses the Firebird 1.5
embedded server. Generally the app loads the entire DB (typically 20-
50MB FDB files) in memory (in a .Net DataSet), displays it to the
user and after that only when the user changes or adds something we
save the change to the DB. In other words, the DB engine initially
does a lot of reading, after that it does some writing via INSERT or
UPDATE and almost no SELECT-s.

In order to minimize the memory usage I played with some parameters
in firebird.conf. Here are some numbers that show pretty good
optimization in terms of memory usage:

DefaultDbCachePages = 256
SortMemBlockSize = 524288
SortMemUpperLimit = 4194304

What is your opinion? Do these parameters and numbers make sense with
regards to other DB performance related criteria? Can we go even
lower on some of these parameters? Are there other parameters which
we could play with?

A very important question for us is what if the DB is on a flash
drive? What can we do to improve the performance there: not only in
terms of memory usage but also I/O performance.

Looking forward to your replies.

Thank you
Val Melamed