Hi all ! Thanks for sending me your comments and feelings... Here is an update of my benchmarks. Times are not precise though... only approximations based on a rapid lookup of the time stamps for my log files and outputs. All machine are x86 from Dell and run under Gentoo Linux (http://www.gentoo.org/) Computers Processor Memory ========= ================================================================ ======== Pelican Intel Pentium4 3.20GHz 2.0 Go Pigeon Intel Pentium4 3.20GHz 1.0 Go Hibou Intel Xeon CPU 2.80GHz (x2 CPU, relax always using only one CPU) 2.0 Go Diffusion model Round Machine Time Time_for_opt/ =============== ===== ============= ======= ============= local_tm --- Pelican 15h00 -------------------------------------------------------------------- sphere MII init Pelican 0h10 1 Pelican 42h00 31h00 2 Pelican 23h00 21h00 3 Pelican 18h00 16h00 4 Pelican prolate MIII init Hibou 0h20 1 Hibou 76h00 74h00 2 Hibou 44h00 39h00 3 Hibou oblate MIV init Hibou 0h20 1 Hibou 76h00 75h00 2 Hibou 44h00 40h00 3 Hibou ellipsoid MV init Pigeon 1h00 1 Pigeon 75h00 74h00 2 Pigeon 31h00 27h00 3 Pigeon 20h00 17h00 4 Pigeon -------------------------------------------------------------------- So, it seems the behaviour is normal with the processing times getting shorter as the optimization proceeds... Maybe the first runs were long because of my errors on the NOEs being too small (I think they could be too underestimated because, with the traditional approach used in ModelFree -- the approach from Mandel et al., 1995 -- I can select only ~20% of residues for model 1 (and almost no residues in subsequent models) under an axially symmetric diffusion tensor... Also, the fitted values seem reasonable. Anyway, it seems I'll get optimized models soon and then I could look at them and maybe exclude models 6 to 9 if I find them irrelevant... Let's see ! A question, however... Is it normal that the X2 in the opt directories as the same value for every residue (for example in the file ellipsoid/round_3/opt/results.bz2) ? Is it the global X2 ? Thanks !! Sébastien :)