Dear Firebird Users and Experts,

I just upgraded from 1.5 on Fedora Linux to Firebird 2.1.2 (Classic)
on a Red Hat EL5 server. The queries are *much* faster, thanks for
all the work that must have gone into this. However I have a problem
with the server hanging periodically and being completely unable to
query the database.

This last happened when I was using isql -- The application using the
database had been zipping along fine all day. I mistyped a select
query and rather than wait for all the output, I ctrl-Z'd the isql
window back to the shell prompt. Then when I tried to start a new
isql session, any query I submitted just hung there with no output or
error. What was worse, the application which was using the same
database was completely unable to execute any queries against the
database.

I tried to kill -TERM the isql session and it would not die. I 'kill
-9''d it but rather than diss appearing, it became, 'defunct'. I
stopped the application that used the database, tried 'killall -TERM
fb_iniet_server", shutdown the firebird server (/etc/init.d/xinetd
stop), restarted it, but still could not connect. In short, I had to
re-boot the machine to get everything working again.

Before rebooting, I noticed the the isc_lock1... file had expanded
from its default of 1meg to 1.5meg. I am assuming that this is some
kind of locking issue but have no idea how to fix it. It has happened
in the past without me ctrl-Zing out of isql, so there is some lurking
problem there.

Has anyone seen this? Any ideas on how to fix this?

- Steve