> There is a server with Firebird 1.0, Win2000 Server; it's a double

processor PentiumIV 1400 Mhz, 512Mb RAM, Ultra Wide SCSI III 18Gb
hd for the databases.

Set Firebird to use 2nd Processor only.
Current Released Ver. of Firebid and IB Open Source do not give good
performance on Dual Processor Servers.
Following is taken from Bill's Tech. Paper: (Same goes for Firebird)
http://www.dbginc.com/tech_pprs/IB65New.html
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Processor Affinity
The superserver versions of InterBase can suffer from decreased
performance on multiprocessor systems running Windows because
Windows will continually switch the InterBase process from one
processor to another. Windows versions of InterBase 6.5 include the

CPU_AFFINITY 1
directive in the ibconfig file to attach the InterBase process to
the first processor. You can attach InterBase to any processor by
changing the numeric value to the value for the bit that corresponds
to the processor. For example, use a value of 1 for the fist
processor, 2 for the second processor, 4 for the third processor and
so on. This syntax will also allow you to assign InterBase to
multiple processors when SMP support is available in InterBase 7.0.
For example, to assign InterBase to processors 2 and 3 set
CPU_AFFINITY to 6.