Deadlocks and Lock Contention with Interbase

[Rich `Lego-Man' Jesse - 7633]

Hello,

We're running PH 7.10.E6 on OpenVMS Alpha 6.2 against and Interbase 3.3L3 DB.
Lock contention and deadlocks are killing us, and we can't find any tools to
help determine what the problem is.

With the help of an excellent program written by a Digital employee, and a few
custom modifications of our own, we've been able to react to the lock
contention in an almost-timely fashion.  The shortcoming of this program,
however, is that it can't determine the Interbase resource that is being locked
in order to lead us to the culprit.  So, we turn to Cognos.

Cognos has an unsupported utility called SBLOCKS which will display all locks
in a given Interbase DB.  The problem with this utility is that our DB has an
enormous amount of locks in it, usually 30K-35K, and the report it generates is
over 128K lines long, and takes up to five minutes to generate.  The problem is
that the SBLOCKS utility displays all locks, not just the ones in contention. 
I've asked Cognos' tech support if it would be possible to release the source
for SBLOCKS, in order for us to modify it like the one from Digital to just
display those locks in contention, but was told that they wouldn't release it. 
Back to square one.

Does anyone have a method for tracking down problems with lock contention and
deadlocks for PH and Interbase?  We are really getting hammered by our users
because of the "downtime" (eg: orders not being scheduled, material allocations
not completing, waiting at the keyboard, etc.) caused by the lock problems.

Any help or suggestions are GREATLY appreciated!   Thanks.

Rich Jesse                              Programmer/Analyst
rjesse@qtiworld.com                     Quad/Tech International, Sussex, WI USA