OK I am getting into the Mandriva distribution, 20 minutes to install and
configure a machine knocks spots off the 4.5 hours to put XP on the same
machine. A couple of niggles with the process but I've run three clean
installs onto an un-partitioned disk, and things are nice and consistent.

PHP did not come with the DVD, but is accessible easily enough, and apart from
a niggle with switching from 2.0.0 to 2.0.1 version of Firebird that also
installed. Just need to INSTALL xinetd before Firebird CS since it's not
included by default. ( Replacing the clean 2.0.0 with 2.0.1 lost the xinetd
config file somewhere :) )

So I have a clean machine, and restoring the database works fast on board, but
accessing the database over the network is s..l..o..w . The current setup has
Apache/PHP5 on a W2k machine and the database on a second machine ( bitweaver
framework ). With FB1.5 running on a W2k machine I was seeing around 1.2 sec
per page, switching to an XP machine running FB2.0.0 this dropped to sub 1
sec, but switching the W2k machine to FB2.0.0 gives 0.6 or so seconds per
page. FB2 runs a lot faster than FB1.5 on W2k, and XP eats into that speed
improvement.

OK switch FB2.0.0 in from the Linux machines, and 1 second becomes 5 seconds.
The IP addresses should all be provided by the 'hosts' file, ping time is sub
one millisecond, all machines are plugged into the same 24 channel netgear box.

The response time from IBOConsole is also very slow when accessing the Linux
boxes as against a windows machine. In fact restore via IBOConsole was painful
on the first box, but a lot better on the second. But are a lot slower than a
local restore, but 10 mins against 10 secs for the first machine? I need to
get 2.0.1 onto that machine which will be the next step anyway.

Where do I go next to speed up the Linux network side of things? These are
both AMD64 machines with 2Gb RAM so they should be faster than the windows
boxes by a long way?

( I'll get Apache/PHP5 running on a linux box to see what happens then, which
is where I am heading anyway - two boxes - one web server the other database )

--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
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