>If I rember the thread correctly, it is a Windows stack issue... if you are appending small strings to a large string, the more appends you make, and the larger the 'apendie' gets the slower things go. Ricks testing show that the throughput was much better to build the large string to a file and then bring the file into memory as one long string.

Heap, but yeah, pretty much correct <s>...

The deal is once you reach a certain string size (which depends on available memory) Windows starts paging - at that point performance gets REALLY bad.

What happens is that the decrease in performance is exponential. Performance
is excellent until you hit about 100k. Increasing 100k to 1meg will take
80 - 100 times longer than 100k for example. Going to 10 megs - I never
got it to finish <s>...

If you know your strings will be large (even if they're not so large - anything
over 25k in my tests) its faster to write output to file and then read the file back into a string with FILETOSTR when you're done.

+++ Rick ---