Hi Tony!

>I am currently importing about 20,000 records and it takes about one
>hour or so using a tcp connection running on the same server.

I'd recommend you to upgrade your Commodore 64, or at least buy yourself a
disk drive to replace the tape!

>I tried the ibdatapump product and it does something with exclusive
>access and can import 4000 records in a couple of seconds.

Well, that should be possible without exclusive access to the database.

Seriously, it looks as if you're doing something very wrong - it shouldn't
take one hour to import 20 000 records unless each record contains several
blobs with high quality pictures (i.e. every record being a megabyte or
more). Since you do not mention anything about transactions, my best guess
is that they are your source of trouble. It takes time to start and commit
a transaction, and your performance may indicate that you do a commit for
every record (and you cannot import anything without using transactions).
I'd say that for imports you could take all within one transaction or
commit, say, every 10000th record.

I do not guarantee you that this is enough to import 2000 records a second,
but with some tuning that should be very feasible.

Set