I am currently running Firebird 1.5.1 SuperServer on my "worst case
scenario" development workstation:

Dell Optiplex
Pentium II 333MHz
128MB RAM
2GB IDE Hard Drive
10MB LAN Card
Windows XP Professional

During idle times it has approximately 41MB of free Physical memory
available.

OK, now for the question ... I have been testing around with the Database
Workbench tool and was able to insert the same number of records (100,000
records committing 10,000 at a time) in 1min 45secs. Now that doesn't seem
too bad, but catch this.

One of my other development workstation is as follows:

Pentium 4 1.7GHz
256MB RAM
80GB IDE Hard Drive
100MB LAN Card
Windows XP Professional

During idle times it has approximately 90MB of free Physical memory
available.

The same insert took 1min 28secs on this much beefier machine.

I did some preliminary research online and turned off Forced Writes on both
of the machines and it improved the insert by about 5 seconds on each. Is
this something that is to be expected? I'm simply looking for the fastest
data access and manipulation possible.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Regards,
Chris