>> Did she try Skip's suggestion to try pymalloc? amk> She hasn't compiled it herself yet, but that's the first thing I'll amk> try. I did try that when the problem was first raised. I just tried it again. It did have a positive effect: w/ threads and w/o pymalloc: user system elapsed CPU 7.64 0.72 0:09.73 85% 7.86 0.45 0:08.66 95% 7.66 0.66 0:08.32 99% w/o threads and w/ pymalloc: user system elapsed CPU 5.44 0.58 0:06.85 87% 5.57 0.46 0:06.02 100% 5.57 0.45 0:06.02 99% The above was with my memory usage trimmed about as far down as I could get it (turned off X, for example). My apologies that both sets of numbers don't have threads disabled. It's just what I happened to have laying around on the disk. Skip