RE: [Firebird-devel] How far can limits be pushed???

[Leyne, S. <sl...@at...>]

Ilya,

> The question is - Can Firebird handle this??

It pains me to say this but...  I doubt it very much.

Allow me to elaborate:

- Support for 50-60gb database

Natively a database of this size is NOT a problem, in fact someone runs
a 980Gb database.

A database of this size, however, will introduce issues related to
backup/restore and data/system recovery.  

Firebird/Interbase does not support incremental backups.  It could
easily take 24 hours to perform a backup, during which time system
performance would be affected, and it could take even longer to perform
a restore.  This makes recovery time an important issue.

You could use the shadow file to maintain a 'live' backup database file,
but it might not address all of the potential recovery issues.

I have been noodling about a new backup method (specifically to handle
the problem of backup and restore of large database -- up to 300gb)
which would address most of the recovery issues -- but I'm occupied with
v1 release issues and haven't been able to pursue the design (depending
on your implementation schedule, the feature might be available).


- Support for 2000 DB connections

Assuming that you asked the question directly and there is no
possibility of using an application server to act as a connection
proxy/manager, the maximum number of connection currently supported is
about 1000.  

If you can use a connection manager then support for 500 connections
should be quite feasible.


- Support for SMP on Linux

The only version of Firebird which adequately supports SMP environments
is the Classic server, to attempt to use "SuperServer" would be ...
suicide.  

Unfortunately, the architecture of the Classic server is such that it
really isn't intended to support a large number of connections --
certainly not 2000.  Although a 4 x 1Ghz server certainly has the best
potential.

Improved SMP support is (in my mind) the first/second priority for the
v2 engine, however, the timeframe for the v2 engine is unknown.


Sean