no no, i don't blame firebird at all ! (sorry for the "!")

> In one of your mails you wrote you use a transaction pool. I personally do
> not understand the use of that, since transactions with Firebird should be
> as short as possible. If you keep transactions open for a long time,
> performance can degrade over time with increasing users and load because of
> versioning in the database.

good memory you have :)
that simple, i make a pool of "read only" transaction and this for 2 raisons :

1/ opening and closing a read only transaction cost a lot of time, especially on heavy multi user database (probably because of some "mutex" to protect some section in the code i imagine)

2/ transaction id are on 32 bit, so max transaction id is 2 zillions and after need to do backup/restore

3/ as i know readonly can stay open undefinitively without hurting the database

now i start even to think to make a pool of "read only" prepared statement to economize the prepare. on the first test i do it's look to work great

> I am convinced it would help you if you get some Firebird specialist to have
> a look at your problems together with you. That specialist would need to see
> the full picture of course, so not only the database but also how you
> interact with it from your application(s).

agree, and i m working on it ...