>
> On its own, I can understand that Fb may want to use as much CPU as it
> has. However, in the light of relatively modest usage by mysql or
> postgres (both averaging CPU load at 1.5-5% everyday), the argument

does

> not hold. Furthermore, shouldn't FB be more I/O intensive than CPU
> intensive?
>
> cheers
> maurice
>

That depends - a high hit rate on records that are already in memory
will leave you CPU bound with virtually no I/O. The way your batch
process appears to be written (from the code snip you sent earlier), I
would be rather irritated at any DBMS that was IO bound.

I agree with the others who have pointed out that the process as
written appears to generate a lot of un-necessary I/O. I believe that
you could refactor this easily to run in under an hour - you just don't
have that much data.

Of course, your sysadmin might be irritated if you used 100% CPU for an
hour, but it beats 10 weeks of thrashing the DASD.