Just a hunch that was provoked by the fact that your exports seem to take longer after the database has been busy: You might query stats$sesstat joined to v$statname and look for statname.name <http://statname.name> like '%cleanout%' There may be a lot of block cleanouts occurring during the export. -- Jared Still Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist On 9/2/05, Branimir Petrovic <BranimirP@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > > a) Over and above taking statspack snapshots before and after Oracle > export, start tracing export sessions, run through some of available > profilers and scratch head some more (become even more bewildered as > new data emerges)?