Colin;

I read your ealier posting wherein you said:

> There is a big change in the OAT and the Next, could this be the
> reason some users are complaining about searches that use to take 5
> secs , now take 1min 10 secs.

I have been told many times in this forum that IB / FB performance
starts with well written queries. Is it possible that the query that
formerly ran in 5 seconds was retrieving data from a table of half as
many records as that same table now has?

> We thought the same about clearing the database connections, and
> have now implemeneted a flag file on the server that tells the
> clients application to terminate (usually when the user wants to
> start another action) ,Great until the user goes off on holiday and
> leaves the pc on with the fantastic Kylie Screen saver (not saving
> anything) running.

We have done a conceptually similar thing, however, we look for this
file in a background (sleeping) thread every 5 minutes or so. This
allows us to FORCE a user off even if they've left the building.
However, we don't yet have an automated way to place this file and
remove it each night, every night. Plus, this is a very interesting
technical question that I'd very much like to understanding fully.

> We would love to hear how this should be delt with "officially"
> using Firebird 1.3.972 as the performance and memory eating is
> somewhat spectacular to watch on a main company server.

Agreed!

Good luck to you.

Regards,

Hugh J Borst