I have a production DB thats about 502 MB (single file) running on FB
(ver 1.0.3) (SS 32 bit) on Redhat Linux 8.0 & I am using a Athlon 2GHz
server with 36 GB SCSI disk and 1 GB physical RAM. This is a resume
database with about 40000 resumes (stored as blobs on the server)

There is something very peculiar happening as the database is being
queried, the server free physical memory count keeps going down as users
keep querying. In fact the database takes up the entire available free
physical memory and moves on to the swap space and slows down users
considerably (1200+ % degrade is common). I am aware of the memory usage
going up coz I am monitoring the same using Linux commands (top d 10)
and there is no other app apart from FB on the said server.

This problem did not exist till the database size was less than 350 MB.
Recently a large addition caused the db size to shoot up past 500 MB and
this seems to have caused the problem.

The frontend is a thick client Delphi app using DBXpress drivers.

What can be the problem ?

Regards,


RP