Heya George ----

Sounds like VFP memory management and string reference. 8 is a divisor of 16, 256, et al.....neat tests, though...can you post the results as a FAQ?

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>Got some very interesting results from a test I ran over the weeked. Using a function that merely passed the parameter back to the caller, I used it to concatenate strings ranging from 1 to 100 characters passing the parameter by both reference and value. I used 10,000 iterations for each in order to get a measure of the amount of time the calls took. Ran the sequence 10 times and saved the information into a table.
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>Basically, the results showed very little difference (max 0.12 seconds over 10,000 iterations). The interesting things (I thought) were: Reference was always faster than value. The amount of time value took "spiked" (had an abnormal jump) between 8 and 9 character strings. The biggest surprise was that the amount of time it took to pass by reference rose in proportion to the length of the string. This was totally unexpected. I don't have any explanation. VFP memory handling maybe? What do you think?