OK, from the various answers, it seems clear we might be doing something wrong...

First, the virtual machines we use for development and test are EXTREMELY slow.

The latency seems to change...

Interesting because some of these servers are complete jokes. It takes them regularly around 1mn to perform jobs that take 1 or 2 s on my 3 years old laptop...

Personally, I would look for "nasty" query doing far too many page reads or something like that.

To find that out, I would set up a server side trace based on...

Took me a while to get back to this... and it's working fine!

Thanks

Thanks

I thought the "political correctness" about correlated sub-query was forgetting how flexible the XML approach was.

Don't repeat it but I still do that sort of things from time to time!!!...

Many thanks,

I'll have a go at this

Oops!

It looks like this object exposes a Url property!

I can't believe I missed that too...

To my defence, my Help seems broken and I could not see these properties...

Poor excuse I...

Actually, for some reason, I did not spot that the variable is stored inside App.config but that still leaves me the problem of trying to overrule this on the fly...

I forgot to specify that I am using Visual Studio 2005 for this...

Thanks for your help anyway.

I did not know about the self indexing.

I checked that but could not find something different between the "fast" and the "slow" group of machines.

It was running fast on my laptop with either 2005 sp3 (32 bits)...

Although we don't understand why, a colleague has found an alternative that does not missbehave.

He simply copies the XML into a simple temp table before doing the extract from that...

Hum... I understand the ideas but it sounds terribly complicated for my little problem...

And I am not convinced that there can't be concurrency issues creeping in.

In my case, I don't...

Thanks

OK, I switched the DelayValidation to True and I managed to get everything fine with an INT parameter but still no joy with the XML parameters.

Since I managed to get...