I'm new to Firebird, so please forgive me if my questions seem naive.

I am developing an application that will access an existing Firebird database which is around 1 GB in size.

I have developed a small app for the purposes of testing my strategies, and I am getting remarkably different results on two different computers.

The app is written VFP9, and accesses the FB database using Firebird ODBC driver. For purposes of testing, I have copied the Firebird database to each of these two test machines, to remove issues related to network speed.

The app creates 3 views, each into a different table in the database, and uses these views to populate 3 grids in the app.

On machine A, the time from when I launch the app until the time that the results appear in the 3 grids is around 2 seconds, almost instantaneous.

On machine B, the time to complete that same task takes over 2 hours.

Here are the specs for machine A (time 2 seconds):
Processor: Intel Core2 QUAD CPU Q9400 2.66GHz
4 GM RAM
64-bit Windows 7
Running 32-bit Firebird and VFP
Firebird server: version 2.1 (fbserver.exe version 2.1.3.18185)
Firebird ODBC driver: version 2.00.00.148

Here are the specs for machine B (time > 2 hours)
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.4 GHz
4 GB RAM
32-bit version Windows 7
Firebird server: version 2.5 (fb_inet_server.exe ver 2.5.0.26074)
Firebird ODBC driver: version 2.00.00.150

In both cases, the running software is 32-bit.

Clearly machine A is the faster machine. But is it 3600 times faster?
The other difference is in the version of the Firebird server: the faster machine is running version 2.1, while the slower machine is running version 2.5.

What do you think explains the difference in times?

Thanks,
Jim