Issue: ====== When database in forced writes mode grows rapidly, filesystem disk operations produce a serious overhead, making performance up to 3 times lower compared with turned off forced writes. Scope: ====== Mainly affects Linux, because Linux misses appropriate system call to make database file grow efficiently. Document author: ================= Alex Peshkov (peshkoff@mail.ru) Document date: 2007/11/21 ============== To make firebird have better performance under such circumstances you may place your database not in a regular file on some filesystem, but on raw device. Any type of block device is supported. For example: gbak -c my.fbk /dev/sda7 will restore your database on the third logical of extended partition of your SCSI(SATA) disk0. Known issue: To be able to do physical (using nbackup utility) copy of database you MUST specify explicit name of difference file: # isql /dev/sda7 SQL> alter database add difference file '/tmp/dev_sda7'; This is required because default location of difference file will be in /dev, which is surely not what you need. It's also better to know how many blocks on block device are actually occupied (or you will have to copy all data on raw device, which can make size of your copy abnormally large). To obtain real size of database, you should use '-S' switch of nbackup: # nbackup -s -l /dev/sda7 77173 Where 77173 is a number of pages, occupied by database. Take care - this is database's page size, not disk physical block size! If unsure, use # gstat -h /dev/sda7 Database "/dev/sda7" Database header page information: Flags 0 Checksum 12345 Generation 43 Page size 4096 <== that's what you need ODS version 11.1 . . . . . . . You may use nbackup output directly in a script, performing database backup: # DbFile=/dev/sda7 # DbSize=`nbackup -L $DbFile -S` || exit 1 # dd if=$DbFile ibs=4k count=$DbSize | # compress and record DVD # nbackup -N $DbFile Or perform physical backup using nbackup: # nbackup -B 0 /dev/sda7 /tmp/lvl.0 In all other aspects raw devices do not have known specific in use. Tip: it's good idea to have raw devices in databases.conf - in case of HW reconfiguration of your server you will not need to change connection strings.