DB Administration Question

Hello, I have been using Informix SE 4.0 for about 2 years. Recently, I was given the task of trying to squeeze better performance out of our plodding system. Our site does not have a dba, nor the funds to hire either a dba or a consultant. I would appreciate your help in understanding how Informix works. Our database is thoroughly unnormalized. I am currently trying to convince our managers to normalize five tables into a master-detail setup. The table structure and record types of the five current tables lend themselves to an easy normalization of the data. What I need to do is convince them that in the worst case, performance won't degrade noticeably. Currently, those tables have about 50,000 rows each, with 4 tables with a row size of about 600 bytes, and one table with a row size of about 1700 bytes. This would, when normalized, yield a master of about 30 bytes containing 50,000 rows, and a detail of about 20 bytes containing about 2-3 million rows. Basically, I have two questions. First, how does Informix use the unix filesystem? We use a VAX 6410 running ULTRIX. With a page size of 1024 bytes, does a query on a table with a row size of greater than 1024 bytes not use the remaining empty bytes of the second page, assuming more than one row is returned on the query? Second, would the normalization of this table adversely affect performance? I would expect not, but the detail contains many more than the 50,000 rows we now need to query on. I greatly appreciate your help on these questions. Viktoras Kaufmann