Migrating to Firebird won't work. EA only allows Firebird repositories
on a local drive.
An Access repository (.eap) should be OK with only four users, though. It might be worth checking that you don't have any
model views set up to refresh once a second or something.
Shape scripts are also very poorly designed wrt performance, so diagrams with large numbers of elements / connectors with Shape scripts can cause EA to essentially grind to a halt. Another major resource hog is
Auditing, so if you're using that, stop.
But once you've eliminated performance sinks like those, the only alternative is to go to a real database. Performance will be far better because you're then using ODBC to connect to the repository rather than SQL over SMB, and the repository is managed by a database server rather than a file server.
If your current repository size is only 58MB you should be fine with an initial size of one or two hundred MB. If you already have an IT infrastructure in place for databases, then that means you've already got licenses, there'll be procedures in place for backups, etc. In database terms, a four-user EA repository is a featherweight so if you sweettalk the DBAs you should be able to slip it onto an existing server.
Finally, migrating from a file-based to a DBMS repository is a simple operation.
HTH,
/Uffe
