Jamie's right...the major problem with IB Classic is that it doesn't use shared memory, you can have as many processes/connections as you want.
The big win will be from the fact that the threaded, "superserver" uses shared memory to share buffered blocks between threads, etc.
Postgres does use shared memory which is why it does so much better than InterBase classic under heavy load, even though it's not threaded. As noted the persistent database connections held by AOLserver (long live AOLserver!) means that the potentially painful overhead of forking new backends in reality isn't, for us here at OpenACS.
It will be interesting to see if InterBase can hold its speed advantage under light load now that it includes the locking overhead inherent with aggressive use of shared memory.
Unfortunately, outer joins are scheduled for 7.2, not 7.1. For some reason the core developers don't understand why some of us think they're so crucial. Feel free to rant and rave and scream at them.
