what, gooshie? :P /set doesn't involve any writing to disk. it takes fractions of a millisecond to set a global variable (<0.01ms on my machine) when mIRC has to create then traverse a linked list of size 1, and around 1.5 times longer to traverse a linked list of size 100 (that is, 100 variables with the same first letter). when considering which data structure to use here, it is not sensible to choose between a hash table and a variable based solely on the difference in execution times, since in all but the extreme cases we are dealing with a truly negligible difference.