smart@... wrote:

>
> > If you are not deleting all the records in a table then look at
> > disabling the non-system indexes on the table prior to the delete
> > and activating them again when the delete has been committed.
>
> Hummm. That's not a good solution in our situation.... We should need
> to edit many many procedures.
> Aren't there some method to disable this "background garbage
> collection"?
>

Garbage collection is handled by a separate thread in v6.0. It shouldn't
directly affect you in the way that it did up to v5.n. What is more likely to
be an issue is the need to maintain the indexes while you are doing your mass
deletes. Hence my suggestion to de-activate non-system indexes first.

Also, if you have sweep turned off you may well find that the engine is having
to also maintain extremely long chains of transaction pointers that it
believes are interested in the records you are deleting. The issue then is not
so much the collection of garbage but the its creation and ongoing
maintenance. Again, keep sweep set to the default, or an even lower value and
the engine will be better optimised to fulfill your requirements.

Paul
--

Paul Reeves
http://www.ibphoenix.com
taking InterBase further