At 01:52 PM 12/01/2005 +1300, you wrote:

Robert, you said:

>The P4 3000 does not have hyperthreading enabled (I will check this
>further) so
>probably the issue is not related to this.

On a lot of of these ill-behaving HT platforms you need to disable HT at
BIOS level.

Interestingly, I was talking to a gentleman in Canberra last year, whose
company supplies pharmacies here (NSW, ACT, Vic.) with a full
hardware/software solution, with a Firebird back-end. He described a
particular 4-CPU server motherboard/chip setup that they build and
distribute (can't recall whether HT was in the equation) that runs Firebird
servers beautifully at a steady 17% across all CPUs with no see-sawing. He
actually promised to document it for us. I should chase him up about that...

Helen