Blob transfer speed optimizations

It is well known that transferring blobs in Firebird over high latency networks (i.e. internet) is very slow. The main reason is that transferring blobs always required lots of roundtrips. The good news is that the donations collected in the 21st Firebird Developers Day (FDD) Brazilian conference are being used to sponsor the improvement of blobs transfer speed. The changes are being developed by Vlad Khorsun and the currently results looks very good (see below)!

Note that the improvements are being developed in two phases. The first phase is ready and didn’t require any changes in the Firebird Wire Protocol, so it will be available in the upcoming Firebird 5.02 release. Transfer times were reduced by 33%-49%.

The second phase is still under development and requires changes in the Firebird Wire Protocol, so it will be available only in Firebird 6, but it already shows great results from 94%-97% improvement! In the best case, the time dropped from 12s to 477msecs!