Thinking about this, its very odd to me that just initializing some STL containers takes up so much time. For someone that has nothing else to do I would love to see the following. A comprehensive analysis of where the time goes in serialization. Most of the really deep and time consuming stuff is in templated inline functions - most of which are reducible to nothing - in theory. I suspect that practice, performance is all over the map in this area. In fact, I would be curious to see something like the above for STL in general. And other boost libraries. Microsoft used to have - up to VC6 a very nice interrupt driven profiler. It was very, very simple to use and didn't require instrumenting the code. I found it very useful. Since I've "upgraded" to VC 7.1 I don't have it now. Of course they've given me something else - but I haven't figured out what it is or how it works yet. Its right up there on my list with figureing out what's involved in making a 64 bit program which runs on ?... Robert Ramey