DATABASE is a standard facility of all 1.5m servers. You cannot assume that all lists have archives of course; but a list that does have archives has searchable ones. All servers have a BITEARN database, which eats a lot of CPU on the first search every month because the index has to be rebuilt from the new MNF. The postmaster may have decided to disable the database functions permanently, or temporarily in cases of intensive CPU load. In that case all search requests will be rejected, but I guess this could happen on a SPIRES server too. SPIRES is probably faster than LSVDBS, but... It takes about 3 secs CPU on a 4381-11 (=4341-12) to perform a "worst case" search on the BITEARN database (I mean the actual search time). It takes about 3.5 secs CPU to analyse the incoming job file, pre-parse this "worst case" command (in REXX), and prepare the output (say 30-40 lines). If the output is larger, the ratio becomes much worse of course. Since SPIRES also relies on a server for passing commands to it and returning the output, you might win on the 3 secs of search time but I doubt you'll win much on the 3.5 secs of 'extra processing', or then you'd be using a simple interface that doesn't support internet mail or something like that. In any case, SPIRES is likely to be maybe twice faster but not 10 times. And it will work only at BITNIC (plus maybe a few other nodes). Two sites have recently installed LISTSERV just for the database search functions, because they were not rich enough to get themselves a full-fledged database system, and they haven't complained about CPU use (nor would I have composed a kind reply if they had - "you get what you pay for, okay?" :-) ). Eric