Firebird for Linux slow on 64bit processors?

Hi all,

we're running Firebird databases on several of our customers' servers. Until some two years ago the servers were running Windows, until we noticed that Firebird on Linux performed way better, so we started using Linux for new servers.

But recently we ran into problems with Firebird for Linux on 64bit processors. Even though they're faster in every aspect we test, network requests to Firebird are three times as slow as on 32bit processors.

Running queries locally works fine, but connecting to Firebird over the network is slow. Also any other network connections work fine, only connecting to Firebird is slow.

We tried for weeks to rule out any other configuration detail that might make a difference, like using different distributions, 32bit or 64bit versions of different distributions, different versions, different servers, different clients, all the same. If Firebird is running on a 32bit processor, it replies quickly. If you take out the hard disk and boot the same system on a 64bit processor, it takes at least three times longer to reply.

Firebird for Windows doesn't seem to have this problem. On a 64bit processor, installing Windows inside a virtual machine and running the server there is faster than running it outside the virtual machine.

Any idea??

Failed to mention relevant software version.
Also, did you check the bug tracker ?

The Firebird version used by all distros and versions that we tried is 2.1. We didn't try whether older versions or the 2.5 RCs show the same behaviour.

As clients we used Flamerobin and some Delphi applications that use IBProvider to connect to Firebird. IBProvider shows the same behaviour in both versions 2 and 3.

Hi, I'd start with this suggestion related to connections
http://tracker.firebirdsql.org/browse/CORE-438
I think it's some kind of network problem, MySQL had something similar regarding DNS.
Then you might want to post to the developer list.

Hi pabloj,

thank you for your reply and suggestions. We looked into it and did some more tests, which helped us to narrow down the problem.

Two months ago Flamerobin showed different speeds when connecting to different Firebirds over a network, that doesn't happen any more.
Currently it's only Delphi programs that are slow. We tried to run some of the code in Lazarus and it works fine.

So it looks like a problem with IBProvider being slow when connecting to a 64bit Linux.

Thank you for your help so far!

Using the latest stable version of Firebird (2.1.3) on a Linux box and haven't received any complaints from clients yet. It's probably a script-related problem.

Just to confirm that the setup is the same: Does any of your clients use IBProvider to connect to your 64bit Linux servers?

We just switched from a 32bit windows server to 64 bit linux servers and it's much faster, we use a php web app to connect to it though. We used to have a delphi program that used IBProvider to connect to it, but that was back when it was still using windows.

It seems to be a problem specific to IBProvider. When we connect using any other method, even other methods within Delphi, 64bit is faster.

Unfortunately we've got a huge code base that can't easily be changed to using another connector.