On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 11:21 PM, Robert martin <rob@...> wrote:
> Hi
>
> 1) Should I even be considering FB for a web site will a v high hit rate.
I don'n know what you consider a high hit rate, but the site I am
running gets about 300000 hits a day.
It runs on Firebird 2.0.4 SuperServer and FB handles the load very well.

> 2) I like the concept behind SS but understand that Classic is better on
> multi cpu machines. If I have 1000 simultaneous hits this means 1000
> instances of FB under classic? would I be better with SS under this
> circumstance?
Since the common scenario would be many connections with short
transactions I chose SuperServer and am going fine. On the downside,
SuperServer will not make use of multiple CPUs or cores. Classic might
be an option for web apps if you are able to use persistent
connections or some sort of connection pool to keep the number of FB
instances controllable.
I would consider SuperServer as the choice for the common Apache/PHP combo.

> 3) What is the best way to connect to FB from PHP? I tried a number of
> methods but they were buggy (I couldn't even connect) and ended up using
> the native IB drivers. I don't like this as a solution. Do I have to
> do ODBC? will it be up to large loads?
The native IB extension is fine and the way to go. An alternative
might be the Firebird/interbase-PDO-driver, but I can't say anything
about it's stability because I went with the interbase extension and
never looked back since.

Hope that helps,

/thomas