>>>Try (4) only for starters ( you may want to play with 64 and try different values) , and take it to 500 iterations so you can compare with the previous results
>>
>>Same thing - start with ~0.14 sec. and end with 1.73 sec.
>>
>>I'm thinking - can it help to sleep for, say, 2 sec. after 50 iterations?
>
>
>So, no improvement at all - gonna sleep on it

For now, no improvements at all. I removed all code except for return string from another procedure (my colleague has been testing this one) and I'll see how it performs when it does nothing - does the execution time increase or not - running this test now - hang on few minutes.

From 0.02 to 0.12 - what do you think?