Hi Martin, >If you have to learn for yourself without a more-or-less-important >production machine to optimize: That's exactly my problem. What I have access to are more or less toy dev boxes on which there is neither the production size data nor are the boxes reasonably big. That's the reason why, I was wondering if there were some shared facilities available which mimic "real" boxes on which to "try" out performance tuning. -- Regards, Ramesh.