Excuse the formatting, I hacked this out of a digest........ My thought is that the hashing algorithm is causing a clustering situation in your file. The filename indicates to me that this is some kind of check file. Is your key a check number and/or a check date? If you write a lot of checks on a certain day of the month and not others, this could be is what is causing the problem. HTH, Pat Shugart Oaksoft Consulting, Inc. (248) 489-6565 ======================================== Date: Mon, 1 Dec 1997 13:32:56 +0000 From: Bryan O'Halloran <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: NM KSAM question MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lars and Costas advised some very good rules to shorten NM KSAM load jobs. I am following most of their rules except that I use SUPRTOOL rather than FCOPY to load the file. One of our load jobs always takes a long time with the last 75% of the load taking much longer than the first 25%. An example is set out below SUPRTOOL/iX/Copyright Robelle Consulting Ltd. 1981-1997. Type H for help. (Version 4.0.10 Pre-Release) SAT, NOV 29, 1997, 4:31 AM Licensee: Mercantile Mutual Life Insurance [114G] >>>> INPUT CHEQFILE > OUTPUT *NEWCHEQ > EXIT Starting combined input and output phase. 25% In=141642 Out=141642 Delta-Min=3:43. Wall-Min=3:43. Cpu-Sec=176. 50% In=285846 Out=285846 Delta-Min=45:44 Wall-Min=49:27. Cpu-Sec=2497. 75% In=430050 Out=430050 Delta-Min=49:17 Wall-Min=98:44. Cpu-Sec=5049. 100% In=577090 Out=577090 Delta-Min=41:29 Wall-Min=140:13. Cpu-Sec=6916. IN=577090, OUT=577090. CPU-Sec=6919. Wall-Sec=8592. Wall-Min=143:12. END OF PROGRAM Can someone explain why it takes over 40 minutes to load the second (and subsequent) quarter(s) of the input rather than the less than 4 minutes to load the first quarter. Thanks Bryan O'Halloran