I have now converted the search clause processing to assembler too. It takes 6.6 seconds of CPU time to execute a "Search frecp11 in BITEARN" (where the 2.5 megabytes of BITEARN NODES have to be read in, upcased and searched), instead of over 5 minutes (--> HX :-) ). Since there is a lot of I/O involved in the process (actually the search time is less than 10% of the total CPU time), it takes about 15-20 seconds of wall clock time but this is still quite acceptable. A side effect of this assemblerization is that the CPU limit is no longer enforced on the search command, as it would take too much time to check it out periodically :-) Eric