FreeTDS Development Group

["Lowden, James K" <LowdenJK AT bernstein.com>]

> From: Cooperman, Marc (Exchange) [mailto:MCooperman AT bear.com]
> Sent: June 6, 2003 11:39 AM
> 
> I've seen some postings that freebcp is slow.
> 
> I can testify to this for Solaris -> Windows.

What sort of problem are seeing?  Is it affected by datatype?  

Raw protocol performance hasn't been a problem since we increased the packet
size to 4096 from 512.  Since 19 March 2003, freebcp has sported the -A flag
to adjust the packet size.  Native mode (-n) transfers are comparable in
speed to Microsoft's.  

In February, I identified our character->numeric conversion as a bottleneck
in bcp loads.  Frediano fixes that in March.  When I tested freebcp's
performance after that, I found we were within 150% of Microsoft's time.
Further improvements can be had in datetime conversions (using 64-bit
integers) and reducing the number of buffer copies.  

These changes all went into effect since the 0.61 release, afaict from
ChangeLog.  Normally I'd advise you just to grab the latest snapshot, but
unfortunately freebcp is a little broken at the moment and might not load
your table.  (The problem seems to be related to table width; sorry I can't
be more specific.)  Still, you might want to give it a try.  I don't expect
it to stay broken for long, and I suspect that the problem we recently
uncovered is in fact longstanding.  You could at least use it to confirm
what I'm saying about performance being a (largely) solved problem.  

An alternative:

ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/ALPHA/freetds/current/freetds-pre-utf8.tgz

That's the state of the project before I introduced design changes intended
to support UTF-8 clients.  It definitely includes the changes cited above.
The project wasn't in any special state at that time; it was just it's
typical, pretty reliable self.  If it doesn't work for you, your only
upgrade path is current CVS, and to bear with us while we work out the
kinks.  nn

> Perhaps turning off
> Nagle at the sender/client might help.

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Performance/Nagle/

I don't think that will turn out to be related.  One thing TDS does not do
is send small packets, especially not small data packets.  

Hope this helps.  

--jkl
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