A second time this year I run into the problem of very poor performance
of GBAK on tables with many deleted records: I have a table which I fill
with some 800 000 records (pretty small records, some 30 bytes each on
average), process it in some way and then delete the records. After I do
this operation, which is quite fast in itself, I try to backup the
database using GBAK - and it hangs on this filled-and-deleted table for
a long time (10 minutes and counting now). Is there some way to do a
delete that would not lead to this problem? DROP/CREATE of the table is
not possible.

(All this with Firebird 1.5.5. I'll see what happens with Firebird 2.1,
but I am not yet ready to migrate my application to it anyway so I would
much prefer to find a solution for 1.5.)

Thanks,

Pepak