gjstpierre77 wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am not familiar with Firebird, but I'm trying to solve a performance
> issue a customer is having.
>
> The system slows to a crawl and when I bring up perfmon, it show the
> pages/sec are pegged. Everything was fine up until a month ago when
> for no apparent reason they started having this issue.
>
> The firebird.conf looks defaulted.
>
> Specs: Xeon 2.8ghz / 4gb RAM / SCSI raid1
>

Sorry my hardware ignorance, but is Xeon 2.8ghz dual core ?

Does you use Firebird Classic or SuperServer ? (Look at the process
name, if it is fbserver.exe than it's SuperServer, if it's
fb_inet_server.exe then it's classic server), from what I had seen on
your message I suspect you are using SuperServer


Now let's take a look on what have been changed in you default firebird.conf

> firebird.conf:
>
> DefaultDbCachePages = 16384
>

what's the page size of the database ?

use gstat -h to get it.

what version of FB ? If it is < 2.0 reduce it to around 8000 pages, FB <
2.0 tends to slows down with more than 10k pages for cache.

If you are using FB classic, how many concurrent users ? This amount of
pages to cache seems too much for classic server.

> CpuAffinityMask = 3
>

This means to use both (2) processors, it's not good for SuperServer
(mainly on widows) ! SuperServer on windows running on multi-core CPU
tend to be slow than running on a single CPU the OS scheduler make the
process jump from one CPU to another all the time.

Change it to 1 (to use just the first processor) or 2 to use just the
second processor.

But if your machine is a multi-core I suggest you to install Classic Server.

> GuardianOption = 0
>

This has no meaning regarding performance.


Give us as much information as possible so we can try to help you.

One important thing is to show us the statistics from the header page
*when* then server is slow (use gstat -h for this). This could spot a
bad written application that hold the transactions open for too much
time, increasing the amount of garbage on the database.

One thing that is common to bring down performance is the garbage
collector process running on a FB 1.X database with a bad index (index
with low selectivity). to see the full statistics for you database use
gstat -a (this could be a huge report) look for indices with lots of
duplicates (> 2000 for example)

come back with more info.

see you !

--
Alexandre Benson Smith
Development
THOR Software e Comercial Ltda
Santo Andre - Sao Paulo - Brazil
www.thorsoftware.com.br