Hopefully someone knows the answer to this, it has puzzled me for some time now . . .

I’m running Firebird v2.1 on Windows for a large customer and I have again come across a very bloated security2.fdb file. It seems to make no difference whether it is Classic or Super and Firebird v2.5 seems to do the same.

In a fresh install of Firebird v2.1 it is all of about 760K, the one I have come across most recently is over 190 Meg.

Checking it with GSTAT shows next txn 744,035,396.

Looking at the file contents there is just a single record in the USERS table, we only use user SYSDBA, we don’t create additional users.

Looking at the file with DBInfo it shows 47,604 total pages of which 1,142 are free and 45,636 are TIP’s which between them account for 98% of the total pages.

One thing I don’t understand is why there would be over 744 million txns on this file? Is a new txn started each time a connection to the database is made?

I find when it gets to this kind of size I see intermittent errors ‘Unable to attach to password database’ from our applications and I have found the only way to ‘fix’ that is to reinstall a clean version of Firebird which resets the security2.fdb file back to 760K and everything works again without errors. I had to do this today in this installation for this very reason.

Is there something wrong with this or is this supposed to happen, should security2.fdb be growing to over 190 Meg and beyond while containing just a single record?

Is there some kind of housekeeping that should be done to keep security2.fdb in shape?

Regards,

Neil Pickles