2 Informix SE problems

I have a few Informix SE 5.05 problems.: 1. I have a customer with a database that has around 6 million records with about a 300 byte record size. SELECT count(*) FROM <tablename> with no where clause takes 5-10 minutes. Same with a dbschema on the same table. It seems that the engine is processing every row in the table. Shouldn't it get the number out of systables? 2. In that same table above, if I have an index on a field that has a large number of nulls (anywhere from 20% - 50% null values in that field), updating that field or deleting the record takes upwards of 5-10 minutes. This is a problem because in the next few months we are going to be loading about 14 million more records (will be decreasing the record size to about 240) into this database and I can't even imagine what kind of time it will take then. This is running on a IBM RS/6000 58H with new SSA Drives and 256MB RAM. I have rebuilt/reloaded the table, rebuilt all the indexes, and bchecked the file. Any ideas would be appreciated. Also anybody using this large of tables with SE? If so I'd like to know if you have any hints on handling large databases. Reply by email please: randy@kpcsys.com Thanks, Randy