On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 8:17 PM, Terry Johnson
<terry.johnson@...> wrote:

> A database we have is several GB and has been functioning well for
> years. Until recently. The first symptom was that writes to the database
> have become very slow (taking a minute or two to commit a simple
> transaction). So we first tried the usual trick of a backup/recover.
> gbak writes a file 1.4MB long and then sits apparently doing nothing,
> yet the fbserver process is consuming 50% cpu (with no other users).
> Tried running gfix -v and got a similar behaviour, several hours later
> still running with no output whatsoever to the console. So then I
> downloaded IBSurgeon and ran that. It ran 'diagnose' happily and told me
> the DB was fine.

Is this database being sweeped regularly? If not it may be that gbak
is finding a lot of old record versions and is trying to clean them
up.
Try running gbak with -g switch.

hth,
--
Douglas Tosi
www.sinatica.com