Am running Firebird 1.5.3 Classic on Redhat 8.0 with a Dell 2650 (dual 2.4GHz,
4MG RAM). Have about 15 million records in various tables. One in a while
(like once a week), the database becomes very busy and slows to where MS-Access
programs can't connect properly (using open source odbc V.2.128). After about
20 minutes, the load average (which gets upwards of 28) calms down to around 2
and the system is not as busy. Requests start to be processed at some point
during this, so it's not quite an 'outage', but becomes very slow.

What is this doing? We were on Interbase before migrating to FB1.5 with a
backup and restore. It had the habit of becoming slow over time. Then we
would do a backup and restore in interbase and it would get faster again.

What are the mechanisms at work here and how can I tune them to not cause an
interruption of service? Even knowing what parameters to monitor would help
predict when the interruption would likely occur.

Thanks!
Tom