Tag: performance

FBPC 1.0.3 is released

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A new version of Performance Comparer for Firebird (FBPC) is now available. Version 1.0.3 has the following changes:

  1. Fixed some parameters data type identifying logic (the traceapi writes the params data types based on their internal field type, not the declared type)
  2. The statement’s grid wasn’t showing a value when the statement execution time was below 1ms
  3. Added some error handling during the statements execution
  4. Now any errors during the execution of an statement will be logged in the errors.log file (in the application directory)

FBPC is a free tool that can help people to compare the performance of real life SQL statements between two Firebird versions, or even between the same Firebird version but with different configurations in firebird.conf.

FBPC 1.0.2 is released

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The new version of Performance Comparer for Firebird is available. In this new version, the parsing of huge trace files is much faster, along with some other small changes and fixes which are listed in the changelog.txt. This is the first non-beta version.

FBPC is a free tool that can help people to compare the performance between two Firebird versions, or even between the same Firebird version but with different configurations in firebird.conf

FBPC 1.0.1 is released

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The new (beta) release of the Performance Comparer for Firebird tool fixes some small glitches and improves the usability. The Firebird Embedded used by the tool was also updated to the official Firebird 5.0 release. More details about the changes can be found in the ChangeLog.txt.

A video (recorded from a recent Live, in Portuguese) is now available on YouTube, showing how to use the tool. Of course, the previous instructions (in English) are still included in the distribution.

Download the new version and get to know how your queries will behave in Firebird 5 (or any version of Firebird), before migrating your customers.

Firebird Performance Comparer (FBPC)

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In my two presentations at the 20th Firebird Developers Day, I introduced firsthand the tool I created to help compare the performance between two Firebird servers (>= 2.5) in an easy and visual way.

This tool actually helped to detect a performance regression in Firebird 5 beta, which was resolved after I reported it to the core developers. The intention is to identify optimizer regressions or low performance issues in Firebird itself, or even the breaking of SQL commands due to new reserved words or syntax restrictions.

I’m making version 1.0 beta available for anyone interested. It’s a version that so far has been tested only by me, so it may and probably does have some bugs.

The FBPC runs on Windows and internally uses Firebird 5 RC1 embedded to store the tests and their results. When you run the application for the first time, it will display instructions on how to use it.

In summary, it helps you create a trace.conf to capture SQL commands executed on a Firebird server 2.5 or higher in a production environment. Then, the tool parses the file and collect the statements, allowing you to run them in a controlled environment of servers, specifying test rounds where the execution time between server1 and server2 is compared and displayed in an intuitive and visual way, enabling you to detect regressions or even commands that could not be executed due to new reserved words or syntax restrictions imposed in new versions of the DBMS.

Fix for Meltdown and Spectre will affect your server performance!

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Microsoft, Apple and several Linux distros started to distribute patches to try to fix the recent security flaws found in Intel, AMD and ARM CPUs, in almost every CPU released in the last 20 years. The security flaws are known as Meltdown (affects Intel) and Spectre (affects Intel, AMD and some ARM processors).

The flaw allow softwares to access protected memory areas that should be accessed only by the Operating System kernel, and get sensitive data, like passwords, etc.

There are two problems with the fixes:

  1. They do not fix 100% of the problem, since it is related on how the CPUs were designed. So far, there is no 100% solution for the problem, and probably it will never exists.
  2. They impact badly in performance.

In a recent post to firebird-devel list, an user reported that the performance of the Firebird server dropped ~30% after he upgraded its Linux kernel to a version that “fix” those security flaws.

General reports over the internet shows that the most affected areas of the system are CPU, RAM and Disk, so any software that makes intensive use of some of those areas will probably have its performance significantly degraded.

Just to be clear: this performance loss doesn’t affect only Firebird, but any software!

Apache, PHP and Firebird Performance Tuning

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In the last post I commented that I had a test-bed application, based on Apache, PHP and Firebird, and once the problem with the images was solved I could finally start doing the actual performance testing/tuning that I originally wanted to do. 

The only major changes from the last post is that I’ve now upgraded the database engine to the “Firebird v2.5 Alpha 1” that supports SMP, and that the application now contains more base data in the tables.

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