Anderson,

Anderson Farias wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Most of my experience with FB have been on Linux servers. Now, I need to
> check on a FB 1.5 Classic server running on a Windows Server 2003 (SMP) box
> for performance and stability issues.
>

I have used FB from 0.9 beta to 2.1 on Windows and Linux (IB 4.0 on
linux only). My preference to Linux is because the guys at my costumers
avoid to touch it since they have some kind of fear of CLI :) Didn't
have any trouble with windows so far, I prefer linux because I can
install it without a graphical interface, a windows server that no one
touches still has all the graphical stuff loaded and running, and there
is a lot of services on windows that I have no idea for what it's there
:(, this is an excuse for me to use linux, but anyone with good windows
knowledge would setup it the right way.

My costumer's databases are pretty small, maxing out on 8-10GB, and in
every place, they don't have a dedicated FB server, they are at least FB
and File Server (I know it's bad, but my costumers are happy with the
performance anyway and don't intend to use a dedicated machine).

> This is an FB DB dedicated server, that deals with about 300+ concurrent
> connections (and going to 400+ soon). One of my first thoughts were to get
> Windows Server out and install Linux since I have the 'feeling' this would
> be a first step on getting more from the machine.
>

I have heard that TCP/IP implementation on Linux is better than on
windows, when I read that was not related to FB but to web/mail servers,
if that fact is true (and still is on win2003) this could be something
to check out. I have heard that MS used the BSD TCP/IP stack
implementation and is ok nowadays, don't know if it's just rumors or if
it's true.

> One of the big problems is that some of the C/S apps that use this DB do not
> handle transactions well and db gets stuck with many record versions...
> than, also there are a lot of bad indices (hi MaxDup, like 80% of table
> records) than when garbage collect get to run, the server gets too busy and
> kind stop handling new connections (People are already working on get rid of
> these bad indexes)
>

I know you are not asking it, but let me ask anyway...
Would not be "easier" to use FB 2.X instead of "fixing" the bad indices
? As you know FB 2.0 handles pretty well bad indices during the garbage
collection process, and you would have a lot of improvements for "free".

So to summarize, I don't think you would have a big difference on
performance just because you use linux or windows, running without a
graphical interface and all the stuff it need to check every moment
could be a difference, but I don't expect it to be big on a 8-core CPU.
Since windows2000 it's stable enough to be trusted.

>
> Thanks for any info,
>
> Regards,
> Anderson Farias
>
>

see you !

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