Distributing I/O
Go Up to Hardware Configuration
Disk device I/O is orders of magnitude slower than physical memory accesses or CPU cycles. There is a delay while the disk device seeks the data requested. While an application is waiting for data it has requested from a disk device, it is advantageous for the application to spend the time executing other tasks. One appropriate way to do this is to spread multiple data requests over multiple devices. While one disk is preparing to return data, the application requests another disk to start seeking another set of data. This is called distributed I/O or parallel I/O.
This section describes ways you can persuade InterBase to distribute I/O over multiple disk devices.