Hi,

> It seems as though all of a
> sudden, for no reason at all the entire application begins to run
> extremeley poorly with unacceptable reponse times. I ran gfix this
> lastest time and forced the database shutdown, ran a verification (no
> errors reported) and brought the database back on-line and magically
> everything seems to be back to normal.

it seems that you have long running transactions that never do a hard
commit.

Please run gstat -h against your database when it is very slow and
show us its output.
Gstat should produce output similar to this:

Database header page information:
Flags 0
Checksum 12345
Generation 70
Page size 4096
ODS version 10.1
Oldest transaction 59
Oldest active 2
Oldest snapshot 1
Next transaction 62
Bumped transaction 1
Sequence number 0
Next attachment ID 0
Implementation ID 16
Shadow count 0
Page buffers 50
Next header page 0
Database dialect 3
Creation date Mar 25, 2004 10:00:27
Attributes force write

Variable header data:
Sweep interval: 20000
*END*


A bigger gap between the oldest active transaction and the next
transaction would be a indicator for the problem I mentioned above.


Christian