Help with theoretical crazyness, please!

> You are sure its not a memory problem?

I am absolutly sure it's not a memory thing. I timed it under normal
conditions then switched off the swap space all together and timed it
again... roughly the same time.

> What's the specs on the machines? Memory, ethernet (and network load, and
> is the card in promiscuous mode), video, etc. What kind of disk drives?

They vary slightly from machine to machine but at all basicly Pentium 100's
with 32 megs of ram and at least 1 gig hard drives, they have S3 video with
2 megs of ram. While doing these tests the network wasn't even hooked up
and it defiantly wasn't in whore more :)

> (I assume that its the same machine that loads SO under wind* in around
> one minute....)

Yes, exact same machine(s) (we have 80 of them) that is currently running
windows/Star office.

> Unfortunately, perl is set up to do that. I don't think SO is ;-)

> But I'd be really curious to see if anyone can come up with somethin!

Yeah, I knew that, but I was thinking/hoping there might be a way to cause
SO to do it too.

Brian Cluff