Hello,

we are using firebird 1.5 super server on ubuntu linux and are
experiencing an odd slow down after about 15 hours intensive use.
The DB server is servicing many short-ish transactions from a pool of
about 150 connections and the db size on disk is 1gig after a day.

All seems nice and fast for about 12 hours then gstat reveals the
following oddity, an unusually old Oldest snapshot when oldest
transaction seems to be normal.

------------------
Database header page information:
Flags 0
Checksum 12345
Generation 9188550
Page size 4096
ODS version 10.1
Oldest transaction 9181346
Oldest active 9181347
Oldest snapshot 9178294
Next transaction 9188549
Bumped transaction 1
Sequence number 0
Next attachment ID 0
Implementation ID 19
Shadow count 0
Page buffers 0
Next header page 0
Database dialect 3
Creation date Feb 6, 2006 12:40:09
Attributes

Variable header data:
*END*
-----------------------

I cannot find much information on what Oldest Snapshot actually means,
and we are pretty sure its not the program leaving open transactions
accidently as Oldest transaction is fine and we have timers in the
code to check for possible leaked transactions.

Restarting the firebird process using the init.d script sorts it out
and the db speeds up again to normal, but this isnt really a desirable
solution.

Any light on the situation would be greatly appreciated,

Thanks,

Alex.