Performance test fails (over one minute)

We are in the process of building a vault for a customer evaluation and have not implemented all of the data yet, but performance is very slow -- is this a Firebird limitation?

Metadata.fdb for the implemented vault is about 500MB at this point. 

We ran the performance test, and the result was network ping = 0.11ms (local LAN), and database write speed (100,000 lines) returned an error "test took too long (stopped after one minute)". This is on a brand new HP workstation PC so I don't think there's an issue with hardware specs, we have just installed M-Files on it and restored one vault.

Is there anything else I should be checking that might cause this much of a slowdown?