Journal file

Hi Toby,

Have a couple of questions, but first here's our system:
Db runs as a standalone aps
We have 80 connections to the db at all time
10 worker threads
Auto-commit is off but we commit after every transaction(need to change
that)
We have 16 tables with 2 tables containing roughly 2000 rows each

Here's how our apps work(4 different jvm):
At start up update the 2000 rows to change the status
Then start updating various field, or insert new rows, as changes are coming
from our network.

Overall McKoi work very well, except when we receive lots of events from the
network that we have to update/insert.  The journaling file gets huge,
around 24Megs(increasing steadily), the cpu reaches 50% (2 cpu machine) and
the memory is acceptable around 70megs  After 25 min. it settles down
to.5%-1% and journal files will go back to almost 0, but during that time
period it's seems that everything is hung.  Doing a simple select won't work
until the db starts to settle down.

My questions are, is there a limit to the journal file? Shouldn't McKoi
reponds to a simple select? Does having auto-commit off and commiting
nonetheless at every transaction make the journal file bigger?  I am also
concerned that the DB reaches 50% on the cpu.  What is the maximum number of
connections that is acceptable per worker threads?

Once the db goes down to listening events it works very well, very small db
file, around 9 megs total.

Thanks!
-P.