# 1240 Record Locks Causing Read Locks to be Held Too Long and Results in Apparent Deadlock

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We have a customer who is running fairly large family entertainment center with our POS software. The facility contains an arcade, full service restaurant, bowling ally, skating rink, snack bar, gift shop, and 12 screen movie theater. They may have up to 30 workstations running at the same time. The problem is that during peek usage time (Saturday night at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.) the processing response of the all workstations start getting slower and slower. Ultimately the all of the workstations freeze and they have to reboot the server and everything works ok. We had the facility manager monitor memory consumption in DbAdmin and everything looked normal. One odd thing is that when the workstations where slowing down the CPU and disk activity on the server would decrease from about 10-12% to almost 0%. One of the workstations gave a "Record Locked by another user" error before the facility locked up. We never receive this error because we use a high lock time out setting in the session component.
The server is Windows NT 4.0 (I assume with latest SP), Windows 98 SE workstations, Delphi 6 (sp2), DBISAM C/S Version 3.10.