At 09:15 AM 2/06/2004 +0200, you wrote:

>I have a server running WinXP Pro with 750mb of ram
>When I restore a database the server maxes out on ram, with only about 20K
>of memory free. This starves my server apps that are trying to serve
>clients connected on other databases.
>db size doesnt really matter, but my databases are around 1GB,
>The server is configured for 20000 8kb page buffers, which means firebird
>should not use more than 160MB of ram for the restore.

No, it doesn't mean that. You're talking about the database cache: that's
the memory that the server uses to store copies of the sets and indexes
used most recently by client queries, i.e. SELECTS. Restore doesn't use
the database cache at all, since it only creates objects and inserts data.

>I did notice that a large part of the ram is being used by the system
>cache - what causes this?

That's the operating system's cache, none of Firebird's business. It's
where the OS keeps its own stuff.

>The machine is configured for background process priority and memory usage
>favours programs in performance settings

gbak is a program.

Rather than trying to work out what is eating what from the Performance
tab, take a look at the Processes tab to get a rough idea of what the
memory usage of each process is.

Re your database cache, 200000 * 8Kb is a pretty high allocation for such a
small amount of RAM. How did you arrive at such a huge cache?

What server model are you using? (superserver/classic).

/heLen