What are the system requirements for Firebird?

Operating systems:
Windows 98,Me,2000,2003,XP,NT,Vista or newer
Linux 2.4 or 2.6 with GCC 3.2 or higher
Mac OS X
Solaris 2.6, 2.7
FreeBSD 4.x
HP-UX 10.0

Minimum hardware spec.:
15MB hard disk space
486 CPU or better
12MB RAM


Notes:
Some of binary packages provided by the Firebird project have higher requirements. The figures above are based on theoretical limits (although we have seen some 486 computers with 12MB RAM running Firebird 1.5), and you might need to compile FB yourself to run on some low spec machine.

Firebird 2.1 (and higher) binaries that are provided for download do not work on Windows 98 and NT anymore. If you wish to work on those platforms, you might try to compile a port yourself. The reason is that binaries are now built with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to support the 64bit platforms, and VS2005 runtime does not run on such old systems.

15MB hard disk space is a server installation. You also need space for your databases, and for sort space. Free space at least 2 times bigger than your databases recommended.

12MB RAM can barely run any modern operating system and swaps to the disk as soon as multiple applications are started. For optimal performance you should have as much RAM as possible as sorts can be done in memory and entire database file can be cached. Consider at least 2GB RAM for 200MB database as appropriate.

While Firebird runs on 486 CPU, it's advisable to use modern CPU with features comparable to your application requirements.