At 06:19 PM 10/04/2005 +0200, you wrote:

>We are moving a client-server application from Access to Firebird.
>
>We tried with a Redhat Linux with
>SuperServer for Linux NPTL V1.5.2 installed
>and also with a Debian Linux Superserver v 1.51,
>but the problem remains the same.

Did you install the NPTL version on a Linux that actually supports NPTL?

>When we have a few simultaneous active clients, the memory used by the
>Firebird server process starts to grow of about 5 MB/minute, and keeps
>growing without any limit until the server crashes.

How many simultaneous clients is "a few"? What are these clients
doing? What is the environment that the clients are running in?

>Any idea on any parameter that has to be configured in firebird.conf
>to prevent this, or of any bad programming that may have been used in
>our client aplications?

There are bad assumptions in programming that can cause memory to become
exhausted...typically, applications that were written to work with database
systems that don't have transactions never commit transactions. A lot of
things to do with the health of the database depend on good transaction
management.

>Our client applications open the connection at the beginnning
>of the operations and re-use always the same connection for
>many hours.

There is no problem with long-lasting connections. The problem is with
long-lasting transactions.

But I *am* suspicious about your use of the NPTL build. The fact that you
didn't mention the versions of the Linuxen you are using seems to indicate
that you don't think it is relevant. It is.

./heLen