Maybe you never read the part about how $ticks isn't very accurate... It might show up to, perhaps, millisecond accuracy, but the program I used was showing the real system time, which was nanosecond accuracy, also.. using the program itself to time something isn't as accurate as looking at a program that can time everything to 9 decimals of a second and doesn't interfere with the application being timed.
You don't need to be that precise unless the results are very close. If you do a test and it's 2ms vs 200ms, you don't need any more precision. For the tests you are trying to do, it is easily accurate enough. Accuracy is fine, but when you don't need it, it's a waste of time and energy.
Sure SQL isn't for everything or everyone, but it's still far faster than INI ever was or will be, and we've been doing numerous tests for a few hours, and INI is at least three-fold slower than a database file with the same info (which you, and others, seem to selectivly not read in my previous posts, that all tests are done with files all containing the same info.)
As I stated, I already could have told you that it would be faster than other file types. However, it should be compared with hash tables rather than other file types because hash tables are designed for speed and easy access to data, so it's a better comparison for what you're trying to do.
