OK, good points (Al too). It's not just 8k of space, it's 8k x running threaded processes, but I get your point about looking elsewhere to optimize.

Thanks.

>Steve,
>
>I don't think it's going to help much, because the effort you have to go through in VFP code to actually use the preallocated string space isn't worth it.
>
>VFP is as fast as the underlying C++ code when it is doing string concatenations of the form:
>
>lcX = lcX + ...
>
>There's probably other VFP code that could be optimized in the class that would have a bigger improvement than spending time worrying about 8k worth of memory allocations.
>
>>I have a VFP7 class with an empty string property. After instantiation, from 3 to 9 methods get called, and each concatenates 100-500 bytes in rapid succession, resulting in about a 5k stirng property when it's done. The caller consumes this string property before destroying the object.
>>
>>Would it make sense to pre-allocate memory for the object by setting the string property to Space(8192), and on the first write set the property to the first string and then concatenate after that?
>>
>>I am thinking that the object would run "faster" because the OS (or runtime) would not have to grow the stack space for the object as it runs. This is for a web app where I have potentially 60-70 objects going at any given second.