I work for a company that uses Firebird for its main database. On
Tuesday morning the performance just came to a halt. Queries that were
taking 10-15 ms are now taking 10-15 seconds. We have been trying to
find anything glaring by going through logs and haven't been able to
find anything.

The firebird server process is constantly taking up 100% of the
processor. Before this slow down it would peak to 100%, but rarely. We
have tried restarting the server, restarting the firebird service,
reinstalling firebird server, backup & restore the database,
increasing page size, doing sweeps and optimizing indexes. Nothing has
made a dent.

The database is relatively large (around 3.1gb) and around five tables
have over a million rows (one has up to 8.5 million). So we are going
to archive some of that data and try the backup & restore again.
However, that process takes about 9 hours total, when it used to take
about 15 minutes to back it up (not sure how long restore used to take).

One thing we did notice was that as soon as we turned off the database
server the processor went down to 1 - 2% like you would expect, but as
soon as you turned the database server back on, it would jump directly
to 100%. I know we don't have that many users that should make it do
that, especially late at night.

So, if anyone can shed some light on our situation we would greatly
appreciate it. We are almost out of ideas. Thanks again.