Helen
Thanks for your reply

> 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?

Seems to be the fastest. I have tried combinations of 10000 pages with 4, 8
and 16k pages, and 20000 with 4 and 8k pages, and this seems to get the job
done. Maybe I need to rethink this? I have a maximum of 8 clients connecting
at a time, and they pump about 10000 rows into about 15 tables every day. I
dont know how else to come up with a cache size aside from a guess-timate.

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

Superserver 1.5

One other thing,

I have turned forced writes off for a week to see if there was a performance
increase, and there was, about 4x increase during bulk inserts. Problem is,
when I shut the server app down, it "hung" for about 3 hours before actually
exiting. ransactions are created when a client logs on and destroyed when
their session is finished, so I assume this had something to do with a cache
being flushed - but I thought FB did that on a regular interval, or after a
fixed amount of activity. If there had been a power failure I am sure lots
of data would have been lost. The firebird.conf settings are default at the
moment.

Thanks
Gary