As you know, Firebird Project devotes a lot of effort to QA and performance testing: we have several test servers to run functional and performance tests every day, with results publicly available at www.firebirdtest.com. The official open-source Firebird performance load test, Firebird OLTP-EMUL, is also running as a part of the testing suite, and its results are also available for the public. QA tests confirm that Firebird 4 release has no performance problems, and any such problem during the snapshot phase is addressed and resolved as soon as possible.

Some days ago one of the vendors of management tool for Firebird has disclosed the document with results of Firebird performance testing, which indicates that Firebird 4 performance is worse than Firebird 3. Since it was a public announcement, not an inquiry to the development team, we have decided to do the investigation and publish its results. The investigation team included Vlad Khorsun, Firebird core developer, Pavel Zotov, Firebird QA, and volunteer Alexey Kovyazin from IBSurgeon. 

The result of the test was the following:

As you can see, it indicates that Firebird 4 is significantly slower than Firebird 3. These numbers (the measurement units are not important for the understanding) contradict the Firebird QA team results and the experience of leading Firebird providers.

Let’s find out the reason - read the full text of our investigation here.