Shalom I've been comparing results from Boost Serialization (B.Ser) and Ebenezer Enterprises(EE) on Windows XP lately. I've compared saving a 1. set<int>, 2. list<int>, and 3. list<int> and deque<int>. I'm using MSVC8.0, Boost 1.33.1, and software from www.webEbenezer.net to build the tests. I use clock() statements to measure the amount of time used. I've read on this list that there is an issue with using clock() on Windows, but I use it the same way in all the tests so doubt it is an issue here. I use a buffer of 4096 bytes in the EE versions and from what I can tell the Boost versions also use the same size of buffer. (I'm not doing anything to set the buffer size with Boost. It seems to default to 4096.) Each of the containers is filled with 1,000,000 ints. Below are a few lines from one of the Boost tests. ofstream ofs("myfile"); binary_oarchive oa(ofs); clock_t start(clock()); oa << lst; clock_t end(clock()); cout << "That took " << end - start << "\n"; Build times/Exe sizes In each of the tests the B.Ser versions take longer to build and the executables are more than two times bigger in bytes than the EE versions. Run times I ran the B.Ser and EE versions 3 times in a row and threw out the fastest and slowest times and kept the remaining middle time. The following results are from optimized (O2) versions of the tests. set<int> B.Ser ----- 1630 EE --------- 451 In this test the B.Ser version takes 3.6 times longer than the EE version. list<int> B.Ser ----- 1440 EE --------- 271 B.Ser takes 5.3 times longer here. list<int> and deque<int> B.Ser ----- 2894 EE --------- 521 B.Ser takes 5.5 times longer here. I've only done a few tests without optimization. The results from those tests have had higher ratios than those listed above. For example, the non-optimized B.Ser version of the list<int> test is about 8 times slower than the non-optimized EE version. One thing that sticks out in my mind is that the optimized B.Ser version of the list<int> test is 3 times slower than the non-optimized EE version. These results are similar to what we observed on Linux previously. http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2005/11/96497.php I didn't test exactly the same thing in the Windows tests and the Linux tests. Feedback from the Linux tests indicated some objection to commenting out a generated call to flush the buffer we use. I didn't comment out any of the generated code in these Windows tests like I did with Linux. And so the Windows tests fill the buffer and flush it numerous times. Regards, Brian Wood Ebenezer Enterprises www.webEbenezer.net _______________________________________