I ommit your one question..

> Interesting. Shadow files are supposed to be an ancient and deprecated
> technology. Maybe it's time for a revival? :-) I'll have to do some
> reading...

I hope that the Firebird team will never stop this idea in case the new version of Firebird

> So, what about writes? Are writes slower than with a harddisk-only
> solution? I'd assume both shadow files have to be written always...? So
> a write will force the client to wait until *BOTH* RAM *AND* disk have
> been written.

I do not see any slowdown in write operations in this configuration.

Karol Bieniaszewski