Aha, t'was written...

"I am wondering if you are getting a very high collision rate on they key for some reason?"

I reckon that this is what the problem is as the key values are very similar all the way through and there's not a lot which can be done about it. Hmmm... I'm trying to think of a better data structure. Thanks for the help everybody who contributed.

Elgon

PS - The box is an 8 processor Sun server running Solaris with 8GB of RAM. Neither the IO nor the memory seem to be the problem from continuous observation of the stats.

update - Thanks to BrowserUK et al. for their help unfortunately the version we are using is 5.004_5 and I am not allowed to change it. Oh well. I'm trying to find a workaround as we speak...

update 2 - Thanks to jsprat, the script now runs in about a minute. Ta to all...

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