At 01:20 PM 3/02/2010, you wrote:

>We are using Firebird 2.1.3.18185 on centos 5.4 32 bit system.
>
>Running lots of SQL statements within a single transaction seems to cause the system to chew all the resources of the system.
>
>Then we get the error :
>
>"operating system directive write failed. No such file or directory".
>
>
>Nothing was recorded in firebird.log.
>
>Is this expected behaviour?

Hmm, first guess on this one is that you have a big sort operation, for which the Classic process needs to create a temporary file on disk because not enough memory is available to do it in RAM. If you don't have a temporary directory defined by one of the environment variables FIREBIRD_TMP, TEMP or TMP on your host server (that is accessible by the firebird user) then you need to configure some space for it and assign it in firebird.conf under TempDirectories.

You might also need to either scale down the amount of SortMem you're allocating to each Classic process, or ramp up the amount of swap available, or put more physical RAM on board, or tweak all of them.

./heLen