At 12:12 PM 15/08/2012, Theodore Zafiropoulos wrote:

>Good morning,
>
>I was looking at a clients system and noticed an abnormally large temporary file created.
>
>The file was called fb_sort_4mlopc and it was in the C:\WINDOWS\Temp folder. The file was dated 26/07/2010. It's size is 560,749,148KB

KB really? or bytes?

>What would cause this large file? Some sort of (perhaps aborted) sort process?

The Firebird engine creates these temporary sort files on disk when there is insufficient RAM available to accommodate them. When the transaction ends normally, the sort files are deleted. They get left behind when the transaction is terminated abnormally (client or server crash, for example).

>The current DB size is 25,193,928KB

- ??

>I am inclined to delete this temp file as I don't think it is necessary. Is that OK to do so?

Yes.

>Current version of Firebird is 2.1.2.18118

More than three years old. Since then, we have had 2.1.3, 2.1.4 and 2.1.5 sub-releases in that series. That's a lot of bug fixes...

./heLen