Dear Friends,

Firebird 1.5.2.4731 superserver on Windows 2000 5.00.2195 Service Pack 4
Intel x86 ~2,400 MHz

I have just heard from a customer that their server seems to be running
slowly - my application is generating a big report at about 30 sec per
page. The client machine does not seem to be overworked, so I have been
looking at the server.

The client box, on which the report generation software is running, has a
couple of percent cpu activity spiking to about 50%, does not appear to be
overoaded.
The server cpu is running steadily at about 30%, memory usage at around
740M, total physical memory 1GB holding steady.

I just now ran gstat -h and got back:

C:\Firebird_1_5\bin>gstat -h <path>\scmain.fdb -user SYSDBA -password ******

Database "<path>\scmain.fdb"

Database header page information:
Flags 0
Checksum 12345
Generation 746030
Page size 8192
ODS version 10.1
Oldest transaction 729287
Oldest active 746023
Oldest snapshot 746023
Next transaction 746024
Bumped transaction 1
Sequence number 0
Next attachment ID 0
Implementation ID 16
Shadow count 0
Page buffers 0
Next header page 0
Database dialect 3
Creation date Apr 18, 2005 17:00:05
Attributes force write

Variable header data:
Sweep interval: 20000
*END*

The Oldest Transaction value looks suspicious to me. I have been logging
gstat -h output at daily backup, and I see from this that "Oldest
transaction 729287" first appeared after
Mon 12/19/2005 21:30:00.09, when gstat reported
Oldest transaction 729285
Oldest active 729286
Oldest snapshot 729286
Next transaction 729291

I am a newbie at running a server like this, so I may be asking a faq. Is
this an instance of a "stuck" transaction that I have read about on this
list? Or is something else going on - do I need to provide more information?
How does such a thing come about, and what can I do to fix the problem now,
and to prevent it happening in the future?

TIA

Walter

/*
C. Walter Ogston
ogstoncw@...
*/