Understanding barrier on Linux

It is known that massive write operations in Firebird databases (like updates affecting thousands or millions of records) had become much slower in more recent Linux servers. After investigation, I found this to be related with the fact that most recent distros brings the barrier parameter of the filesystem activated.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to solve this “problem” completely, without opening a door for corruption. The slow down when barrier is enabled can be minimized a lot if the database is configured with forced writes OFF, but this also may lead into corruption if something bad happens to the server.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to share an article that helps to understand how barrier works and why it slow down such kind of operations.

Firebird Django and the Future : FDB pure python driver , Django 1.4.x , Python 3.x support

Maximiliano Robaina wrote on the firebird django group some words and questions about the future of the driver :

My ideas for future organization are:

  1. Update de google repository with the last django-firebird version with support for django 1.4. It will be the last update in this sense.
  2. From here, the next oficial repository will be at github
  3. The version on github will use fdb in place of kinterbasdb

The point 3 is the most important to discuss because it means the total drop of firebird 1.5.x support.

I have added to the group the notes for installing django 1.4.x firebird driver on ubuntu

ps: bonus for using the FDB driver is python 3.x support out of the box , that means we can start testing django 1.5 on python 3.x

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