Hello,

My config is

Windows XP Pro
Firebird SS 2.1.2.18118

I have a rather large database of around 110M records in 1 table.

I needed to do some housekeeping, namely a backup/restore due to the DB starting to slow down and I also noticed a large difference in the oldest transaction and Next transaction (indicating garbage) when I did a gstat -h on the database file

to backup, I use the following command

gbak -v -t -user SYSDBA -password "masterkey" DBNAME.FDB DBNAME.FBK

this normally takes around 30-45mins.

Then after this completes I do a restore using the following command

gbak -c -v -p 8192 -user SYSDBA -password "masterkey" DBNAME.FBK DBNAME2.FDB

The restore takes around 3 hours.

The last backup/restore I performed less than 1 mth ago.

I once deleted some 6mths of data from the database and the restore process took around 4 days to complete, however, the backup was still rather quick at about 30-45 mins.

My problem is that this time, the backup/restore is yielding unexpected results. The backup stage of the housekeeping ie

gbak -v -t -user SYSDBA -password "masterkey" DBNAME.FDB DBNAME.FBK

is still to complete after running for about 5 hours and the gbak command is stuck (or at least it appears that way) in the following line

gbak: writing data for table SMDR

SMDR is the large file. Normally I get

gbak: writing data for table SMDR
and after a minute or 2 the records are written ie
gbak: 20000 records written
gbak: 40000 records written

and so on until the records have all been written.

Task manager shows low CPU usage ie <3% very infrequent spikes to 15%,
Can anyone tell me why the backup command is taking so long? Have I reached a FB limitation?

Please let me know if I need to supply any more information

gstat -h has the following

Flags 0
Checksum 12345
Generation 25467545
Page size 8192
ODS version 11.1
Oldest Transaction 3017525
Oldest active 25467536
Oldest snapshot 25467536
Next transaction 25467537
Bumped transaction 1
Sequence number 0
Next attachment ID 5627
Implementation ID 16
Shadow count 0
Page buffers 0
Next header page 0
Database dialect 3
Creation date Jan 5, 2011 19:12:30
Attributes forced write

Variable header data:
Sweep interval: 20000
*END*

Thanking you all in advance