About remote memory references - yes it's supposed to be slower in NUMA (but 7-8 times looks like a rather huge penalty for doing this?). But anyway - see my latest post where I simply referenced dual over and over and over. It's a read-only memory location so hardware should be able to cache it to avoid remote memory references? ...reading from dual cannot be described as "a read-only memory location." There is a lot more to it than that. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l