The year will be the strong section inside Firebird Conference devoted to Firebird performance. The talks announced below will be devoted to the most popular questions regarding Firebird performance.

Firebird and disk I/O, Dmitry Yemanov, lead Firebird developer
Disk access is the most expensive operation in any database and RDBMS vendors use a lot of tricks to get most of this area. Providing durability ("D" in ACID) is especially important as it introduces an obvious conflict between reliability and performance. This session describes various durability aspects at three different levels — Firebird, operating system and storage hardware — and explains how they interact with each other, what tuning options are effective and how to balance between them. We'll talk about forced writes, OS-level caching, journaling, filesystem barriers, etc.

Diagnosing and fixing Firebird performance problems, by Alexey Kovyazin, IBSurgeon
The question «how to find and eliminate performance problems in Firebird» is important for all database developers.  Firebird offers the number of tools and APIs to answer the question: transaction markers, MON$ tables, TraceAPI, databases and queries performance statistics, and this session will describe how to find the exact reason of slowness in the particular database. We will consider the practical examples of problems and appropriate fixes, based on real-life logs from the production Firebird databases.

Firebird performance comparisons, by Paul Reeves, IBPhoenix
This session will provide performance comparisons between Firebird 3 and Firebird 2.5 using a test harness based upon TPC-C. The data is derived from hours of testing covering different hardware and software configurations taking into consideration things like Server Architecture, Memory, Database size, HDD/SSD etc This should enable us to build a full picture of the impact of how a single configuration change can affect overall performance. Some of the questions this session will answer: does the improved multi-threading in Firebird 3 bring benefits under heavy load? Is SuperClassic still relevant? What is the penalty for using network compression and encryption? Does database encryption sacrifice speed for security?

More performance sessions will be announced in the next weeks too... But there is only 1 day left to register for Firebird Conference 2016 with the Early Bird discount. Hurry up and register today!