Issue #2553 has been updated by Andre Nathan. The new patch fixed this issue for me. Thanks a lot! Here's hoping that the patch will be merged into ruby_1_8_7. I believe it'll make it easier for distributions who package this version to have this performance bug fixed. Thanks again! Andre ---------------------------------------- http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/2553 ---------------------------------------- http://redmine.ruby-lang.org