Hi Phil. Slow first query certainly is cash filling. I'm not great
inside IB guru, but simple logic - system tables should be as much
cashed as it possible. So I recommend you to take a look at
http://ib.demo.ru/DevInfo/gspeed.htm
no matter it is Russian site - SQL is written in SQL. :) As you have
many SP, I suspect play with indexes on RDB$DEPENDENCIES can help you.
And one more - I have not much experience with SS, but for Classic
10000 page buffers is TOOOOOO much - every connection will try to get
such amount of RAM and your OS will start swapping when it will be
exhausted.

Best regards.