Thanks for all your help. You all make good points which I will consider. However, after talking to the SGI admin, I have access to all of any available memory on the machine. So, whatever is left of 16G from other processes is available to me. At any rate, I knew the version of perl was an older one (version 5.004_05), and he fixed me up with a newer one that I was unaware was installed. Works fine now. First place I should have looked I guess. And yes, I agree a database would be beneficial, but I would like to have both methods as options. Thanks.