I've forgotten who it was, but someone a week<?> ago was asking about performance increases on their machine after replacing the kernel. I had thought about the Super Page patch, but didn't mention it because I thought it was only useful on the Alpha architecture [read: the wheel everyone is reinventing ;) ]. I was just working with it and noticed that it does, in fact, support i386 (and sparc64). So, you might want to try it. Note that it only patches 2.4.18 and 2.4.19, and the i386 code is beta. But, as quoted from the web page: "This is a project to make Linux to use super-page feature of some processors. The matrix transpose benchmark runs 4 to 5 times faster than the normal kernel on an Alpha 21264A-667MHz machine. And I got about 18 percent higher performance on SPEC fp2K with this patch." I wouldn't expect i386 to improve this much, and it's a benchmark -- not your specific app. But 4x to 5x is worthwhile for a constant factor improvement if someone else has already done the work. :) See: http://shimizu-lab.dt.u-tokai.ac.jp/lsp.html Happy hunting, philm -- "To misattribute a quote is unforgivable." -- Anonymous