--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, "Ann W. Harrison"

>
> Interesting. What operating system?
>

Multiple platforms. On Window's, forced writes is off. And the records
can be large with significant blob data.

>
> How are you measuring I/O performance?
>

Why? Would you expect INSERT performance to be CPU bound?

>
> What interface are you using? What Firebird architecture
> (i.e. Classic or Superserver) How may indexes are active?
>

Superserver. Should I be considering Classic?

>
> Yes, probably, but depends on the answers above.
>

It seems intuitive to me that if the inserts are IO bound that forcing
them to be sequential would speed up the disk as the write head would
not bounce around so schizophrenically.

Also, it seems to me that I've gotten exceptions in the past when
trying to deactivate indices during inserts and reactivating them
after commit. It's a pretty interactive application with millions of
related records; multiple connections are doing a lot of things at a
time. Some doing queries, etc. I think I just have to figure out how
to make my inserts smaller and maybe minimize my BLOB usage. :)

R.