Comments please on performance - table to table copy

Comments please on this recorded performance for a table to table copy (insert into <> select * from <>). System :- Intel 4 x Xeon 700 2 Gb Ram Acceleraid 352 RAID controller Linux Redhat 7.0 IDS 9.21 Forget I/O performance for a minute - no I/O involved in the bit I am interested in. Onconfig :- No KAIO (platform) NOAGE=1 NO AFFINITY (platform) Important (and constant) - BUFFERS 200000 Everthing else - tried changing just about everything to values within reason (one change at a time), including :- MULTIPROCESSOR (0, 1) NUMCPUVPS (0->4) NUMAIOVPS (2->32) ... Varied just about everything ... Benchmark :- UNLOGGED DATABASE !!! (don't want to cloud the issue with logging) create table test (char(40)); create table test2(char(40)); <create a text file test.unl, 40 columns of char, 1,000,000 rows> load from test.unl insert into test; (Now, during the following operation, only user on the system, no matter what config changes, disk drives are absolutely silent ...) insert into test2 select * from test; During that operation, about 22,000 (44,000 kb, ~44 Mb) of buffers were modified. What you'd expect. Question - how long should it take on a beefy system? Takes more than ten seconds on the system under test. Is this reasonable given only CPU and memory (no disk, I/O) are in use? Much appreciated if someone can describe their hardware/os/system that performs better. Regards Brett Randall