Classic and Super Server architectures.

    Starting with IB4.2 on Windows, Interbase offered a new internal architecture, known as SuperServer. The idea was extended to other platforms afterwards. The basic idea is to replace a group of cooperating processes by a group of cooperating threads inside only one process. This facilitates communications between different threads and improves security, but it has two main drawbacks: if a thread crashes, probably it will trash the whole IB process and second, in platforms like Windows where SMP support schedules entire process and not threads, a multi processor machine won't produce better performance.

    As more OS platforms add support for threads, it's expected that the SuperServer architecture will prevail and receive the need optimizations to make this the preferred if not the only architecture available in the future. For a detailed discussion, see the paper SuperServer vs Classic in the official IB web site.

This page was last updated on 2000-06-12 16:59:25