(Sending from within Yahoo, I seem to be having trouble sending
emails to yahoo groups from my ISP.)

Hi Mike,

>> So I am experimenting with 5 minute timeouts on the problem
>> Firebird server and we will see how it goes. If all goes well
>> at 5 minutes I may even try dropping it back to 2 minutes.

...

> So is there any downsides to setting keep alive to a short
> period?

I only ever went back to 5 minutes - as that seemed to resolve
the worst of the problems experienced at this client.

I ended up using this setting on most of the servers, not just
the Firebird server, in an attempt to resolve various terminal
server related issues. It certainly seemed to help.

I never discovered anything more definitive.

> I want to set timeout to even shorter value of 30 seconds.
> My problem is that my internet provider's network appliances
> are "too smart" and they close idle connections real fast. At
> least thats what I suspect.

30 sec seems very short of internet purposes, I would be
inclined to try and verify your suspicions first.

I would assume that the slower the network the more likely a
small keepalivetime would be to have impact. My client's
problems were on a LAN, I'd be reluctant to go too short on an
internet connection, unless you can do some trials first.

--
Geoff Worboys
Telesis Computing