A visitor of FBNews (Simon) just pointed out that the ticket for “SMP support in FB 3” was marked as resolved by Dmitry Yemanov today, in the Firebird tracker.
The Firebird Superserver has one process and multiple threads, but no SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing), i.e. a dual-core machine. It serves many clients at the same time using threads instead of separate server processes for each client. Multiple threads share access to a single server process, improving database integrity because only one server process has write access to the database. The main advantage is however that all connected users share the database cache. If a data page has already been loaded for one user and the second user needs to access data on the same page, it doesn’t need to be reloaded a second time into the cache.
Definitively, the most wanted feature in FF has landed.
For context
The Firebird Superserver has one process and multiple threads, but no SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing), i.e. a dual-core machine. It serves many clients at the same time using threads instead of separate server processes for each client. Multiple threads share access to a single server process, improving database integrity because only one server process has write access to the database. The main advantage is however that all connected users share the database cache. If a data page has already been loaded for one user and the second user needs to access data on the same page, it doesn’t need to be reloaded a second time into the cache.
http://ibexpert.net/ibe/index.php?n=Doc.ServerVersionsAndDifferences#Super