> I tried to reduce the transaction isolation to be READ COMMITED (the
> shallowest one of firebird) but it only reduced by about 10% - 15%, it
> means the CPU usage of firebird was still about 70%-80%.
> It seems to me that the better machine specification used (Pentium IV
> 2,4 GHz and memory 512MB) did not reduce the CPU Usage of firebird
> process. :(

Usually on my laptop during batch load I get approx. 25% CPU to
Firebird, 25% CPU to Java, the rest (though it is not displayed in the
task manager - the load remains at ~50%) is eaten by disk subsystem.

However here I talk about multi-million tables (e.g. for TPC-H test I
have inserted about 10 mln records), your 17.000 record table would be
hard to measure without a software tools...

Can you provide me your test case? I could start it on my Linux machine
(Gentoo) and report you the numbers...

Roman