Carlos,

At 11:05 PM 28/08/2004 +0000, you wrote:

>Hi All;
>
>So far I had no answer for the msg below. Could you please help me?
>
>Regards
>Carlos Eduardo

If you are sure you properly eliminated the client library problem - that
you did not try to solve the problem by simply copying a renamed
fbclient.dll - then the next thing to comment about is this:

>However I'm having, too frequently, CPU usage reports with peaks of
>100% CPU usage for a period of 10-20 seconds, in simple queries,
>which is affecting the system performance in the client machines. For
>your information I don't have other relevant services running in the
>same server.

These 10-20 second burst of CPU usage might be nothing more than automatic
sweeping. Though undesirable, it's not unusual with IBX applications to
have a lot of uncollected garbage hanging around for long periods, that the
background garbage collector can't touch. It remains until the threshold
set by the sweep interval is reached, prompting an automatic sweep. Your
bursts of heavy CPU activity are quite likely to be a sign that a sweep is
happening.

The usual cause for this condition with IBX applications is the default
behaviour of IBX with regard to committing transactions. It uses
CommitRetaining, or "soft commit". It is like commit in that it commits
pending changes; but, unlike commit, it does not release the garbage (old
record versions) for cleanup by the GC thread. So, if you write
applications that never call Commit explicitly, or do not do so often
enough, you will get auto sweeps occurring.

The standard Borland support response to this problem is to say "Set the
sweep interval to zero and stop the auto sweeps." This "solution" then
gives rise to another (worse) problem. The IBX application continues to
stack up garbage, and to increase the size of the memory structure that
holds information about "interesting" transactions. Performance gets
slower and slower and, eventually, the server freezes or crashes when it
runs out of memory.

If you disable auto sweeping, you *must* do manual sweeps - and do them
often enough to keep ahead of the buildup rate that is set by your
application's (mis)behaviour. It's a total myth that sweeping can be
ignored. It's also a fact that applications written to take care that
transactions become "uninteresting" as soon as possible do not exhibit
garbage buildup, memory-hogging or CPU-hogging.

Oh dear, a sermon. It must be Sunday.

./heLen