Hello Alex, AV> Oh my! That's ptmalloc on Windows, isn't it?! That little thing AV> seriously rocks in multi-threaded systems with a lot of dynamic memory AV> allocation. It can resolve nasty scalability bottlenecks there by AV> getting rid of a mutex in malloc/free. AV> Not sure if it will do much good for Ruby though - Ruby threads are AV> green, not native. Yes it will improve the runtime speed but it also has lower fragmentation then the original msvcrt.dll implementation. -- Best regards, emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com Lothar Scholz http://www.ruby-ide.com CTO Scriptolutions Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's