>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?
>
Hiya Gonz,

I can't recall off the top of my head if similar "spikes" occurred at 16, 32, 64, etc.

I'm not too sure about an FAQ, but I'll be happy to post both the code that produced the results and a selected summary of them. After all, there were 100 results summarized.