Mirek B. wrote:

> we are running Firebird 1.5.2.4731 SS

NTPL or not?

> on SUSE 10 (32-bit, kernel 2.6.13-15-smp)

Which hardware? How many CPUs? Are you sure SMP kernel is a right
choice? Perhaps you have Pentium 4 with HyperThreading? Have you tried
to disable it?

> This is mostly apparent when doing a backup, and server being completely
> idle otherwise, or when pulling several tens of megabytes worth of blobs
> out of the database. It's just slow as hell. Doing (re)nice on fbserver
> doesn't help at all.

Aside of CPU issue, you could have bottleneck in your hard drives. What
is the technology? SCSI or IDE, SATA or PATA?

> I did some STFW on the subject, but suprisingly found nothing. Is there
> any way to increase the usage of CPU? Could upgrading or moving to
> classic help?

It probablu will. Or you could try to reconfigure your system and
Firebird (disable HT, set CPU Affinity, check for DMA setting for your
disks, etc.)

--
Milan Babuskov
http://swoes.blogspot.com/
http://www.flamerobin.org