>On the test I did, I used a table with nearly 2 million records, and 7 index tags. The table is 1.5 GIGs in size. The reindexing operation took nearly
>1.5 hours, and it did make multiple passes through the table creating the keys. the indexing then was less than 2 seconds. As each succeeding key was added, the operation took measurably longer (a few seconds) to complete. The temp files grew quite large during the key creation part of the operation, were emptied, then grew again on each pass.
>
>As a result, I am as lost as ever before <eg>

I ran the following code on a 250,000 record address table with 21 fields

clear
use test excl
delete tag all
for lnI = 1 to fcount()
   fname = field(lnI)
   x = seconds()	
   index on (fname) tag (fname)
   ? fname + ":", seconds() - x
endfor
return

The first index to nearly 16 seconds to create. The following 20 index tags tok 1.5 seconds or less to create each. When I issued a REINDEX command on the table, all 21 indexes took less than 2 seconds each to create including the first one. Obviously, there is no accurate way to time this except to eyeball it with set talk on and set status bar off.