filip.moons wrote:

>> Could it be that the CPU's are basically idle because they are
>> waiting on the drives to send them some data?
>
> That's what i think too but kinda hard to explain to the customer that
> its expensive system isn't that smooth as he thinks it is. On top of
> that customer states his other apps (SYBASE) aren't slow at all.
> Is firebird more demanding on HW, especially HD performance, then
> other DBs?
>

I've been using Fb on servers with mirrored drives for years without
seeing such slowness. I'm now using Fb/1.5 on a Dell2850 (2 CPUs
(3GHz), Win2003) server with mirroring and everything seems
ok. Hyperthreading ON or OFF didn't make much of a difference.

There is (in Windows servers) a "Performance Monitor" which can show
more detail than "Task Manager" - does it reveal anything interesting
about disk I/O or CPU activity?
Is your database named *.gdb? (Don't remember if this could be a
problem on Win2k3...)
Are other applications running om the server? Do they run
well? COuld it be a conflict between applications
(CPU/RAM/disk)? Could it be some problem with the disks or
mis-configuration with the RAID setup?
Maybe someone knows about programs for performance testing?

--
Aage J.