Subject Re: [firebird-support] Performance issues moving to new server with later Firebird version
Author Alexey Kovyazin
Post date 2016-04-19T07:39:16Z
Hi Bob,

In general, we recommend to apply the same configuration as at the old server (even if it looks not very good), and compare the performance - if there will be a problem, obviously it will be related with the new hardware/OS.

If there will be the same performance, then you can tune firebird.conf.
If you don't know exactly how changes will work, change one parameter at a time.

Also, you can get optimized configuration file from our web-site
http://ib-aid.com/en/optimized-firebird-configuration/

And, look at the hardware guide: http://ib-aid.com/en/articles/firebird-hardware-guide/

Regards,
Alexey Kovyazin
IBSurgeon HQbird





 

We have a 127GB Firebird database that was running on Windows Server 2008 x64 with 16GB of RAM and Firebird SuperClassic v2.5.2.26539.  The database has a page size of 8192 and buffers of 6144, and ODS version 11.2.


Due to time constraints I could not do a backup+restore on the new server, which is Windows 2012 with 32GB RAM and Firebird SuperClassic v2.5.5.26952.  However, most activity on this new server with the old database is much slower than the old server.  I'm only seeing about 1.5GB Private Bytes in use, jumping occasionally to 2.5GB with a working set of 1.1GB and Virtual Size of 2.7 (as per Process Explorer).


The only changes that I have made to the stock Firebird.conf are as follows:

DefaultDbCachePages = 384

FileSystemCacheSize = 50

TempBlockSize = 2048576

TempCacheLimit = 567108864


The database is comprised of many images up to 1.5MB in size, but they are not accessed very often.  The actual data size outside of these images is probably 1/3 of the total DB size.


There are typically about 20 connections to the database servicing up to 140 users, with a mix of read and write transactions, as well as some reporting.


The header statistics look like this:

Database header page information:
        Flags                   0
        Checksum                12345
        Generation              106862144
        Page size               8192
        ODS version             11.2
        Oldest transaction      103869407
        Oldest active           103869408
        Oldest snapshot         103869408
        Next transaction        103870442
        Bumped transaction      1
        Sequence number         0
        Next attachment ID      2991646
        Implementation ID       26
        Shadow count            0
        Page buffers            6144
        Next header page        0
        Database dialect        3
        Creation date           Feb 2, 2014 22:06:05
        Attributes              force write

    Variable header data:
        Sweep interval:         0
        *END*



I'm looking for some guidance as to how changes that should be made to the Firebird configuration file and to the database when I do a backup/restore.  For instance, I'm sure that I want to jump to 16KB pages, but what about buffers? 


There are other services that run on this server, so I cannot use all resources for the database.  However, I believe it is provisioned well enough that I can certainly use half of the resources - processor and memory - without affecting the application server and web server that are running on the same box.


Thank you for your time,


Bob M..