Stored procedure overhead

Informix documentation advises that using stored procedures can improve performance because the procedure is stored in the database in an executable form. (Which makes sense, since you avoid syntax-checking, creation of query plans, etc.) However, some recent experimentation appears to show that there can be a surprisingly large overhead involved in stored procedure execution. I wonder if anyone can provide any insight. I'd written a stored procedure that took what I thought was surprisingly long to execute. To get a handle on where the performance bottlneck was, I created a table that would log a timestamp and comment, and I wrote a "log" procedure: create procedure log(comment char(30)) insert into logtable (sl_stamp,sl_text) values(CURRENT,comment); end procedure I sprinkled a number of calls to "log" throughout my procedure and then executed the following three commands together: execute procedure log("begin"); execute procedure myproc(); execute procedure log("end"); Then I looked at the contents of logtable. I was quite surprised to see: sl_serial sl_stamp sl_text 2 15:15:52.6 begin 3 15:15:52.8 first log within myproc() ... 15:15:52.8 all other logs withing myroc() ... 15 15:15:52.8 last log within myproc() (just before end of procedure) 16 15:16:06.4 end That is, within the resolution of the clock, the entire stored procedure happened essentially instantaneously, yet it took nearly 6 seconds to return from myproc() and execute the "end" log. The stored procedure only has four local SPL variables, does not create any cursors (i.e. no "foreach"es), does not create any temporary tables, does not return any values. What on earth is taking 6 seconds to clean up before returning? Any suggestions of other things I could look to clean up to reduce this time? It seems to me. BTW, that whatever is causing this can't _just_ be "stored procedure overhead" because the logging itself is being done by stored procedure and there is only a .2 second delay between the first log and the second... Preceding was executed using dbaccess under Informix 7.1 (SE).