Ed,

 

The dialect between the client and the server is quite "chatty" so it isn't likely that FB3 wire compression will help tremendously.  Normally someone would use a custom data provider and custom data client that is more optimized for low latency and low bandwidth connections.  Client/server architecture is designed more with a LAN environment in mind.

You should look into setting them up with the ability to cache the schema data locally.  This would save on their startup time.

TIB_Connection has a property called SchemaCacheDir that will specify a location where these are stored.  If you do an update to your database, just delete the files there and they will automatically regenerated the next time the application runs.

 

Hope this helps,

Jason Wharton

www.ibobjects.com