Firebird performance question

Hi all,

This probably is a stupid question, but I have not yet figured it out, so hopefully somebody can enlighten me...

We have a firebird server running on a Dual Xeon (2Ghz) machine with 2GB RAM and a Sata Raid 5 Array for the database storage under Win 2K3 Server OS. So the machine is pretty well scaled for our needs. The CPUs are Hyperthreaded, so I have 4 virtual CPUs available. The FB Server (Superserver) is configured in the firebird.conf with CpuAffinityMask = 14, so I use 3 of the 4 processors for the FB Server mainly.

Now, my problem is that (although I find the overall performance of the system OK), I think it could do more if FB would only make use of the RAM available. The main database file I have has approx 2GB on disk and in complicated queries there is lots of disk activity and average CPU activity mainly on 2 CPUs. Also the memory footprint in RAM of FB is never more than 100MB, no matter how complicated the query...

So how do I make FB use the RAM available, like e.g. keeping part of the DB in Memory to process faster?

I read the article about correlation of page size, disk block site etc. and find it worthwhile considering to improve the performance from disk; yet, that still will not change that I have 70% of my RAM idle

Any ideas anyone?

Thanks much, Manuel.

AFAIK Firebird SuperServer should be pinned to one CPU.
Switch to Classic Server to take advantage of multiple CPUs.

Hi pabloj,



Well, I am aware of that as well and have tried it. I did find an overall better performance running the superserver bound to 3 CPUs. Yet, the CPU binding does not really do anything to the used memory, which IMHO should have a considerable effect on performance

Thanks anyway on the hint.