Learnt quite a bit thanks.

And I had wondered about the gstat -h.... Page buffers 15000
..Line for a while.

Just to confirm The DefaultDbCachePages in conf file was set to 75 pages
before last fb restart. I have double checked where the /etc/xinetd/firebird
file is pointing to. Ran find / -name firebird.conf -print, renamed any
matches, they were not in the PATH or pointed to in any way. Double checked
the 'env' for all current environment variables.

Time to request some more ram and move to classic firebird 1.53.

Thanks

Alex.