Hello Joel, Tuesday, December 06, 2005, 12:54:57 PM, you wrote: JR> Is there a way to check the number of outstanding messages in a Chan JR> or TChan? either 1) use MVars/TMVars instead of Channels. in any case your logging thread must consume data not slower than other channels produce then. in fact, using Chan have meaning only to smooth temporary speed differences between different threads. are you really need this?? 2) i hope that you already replaced passing a Chan to subroutines with passing an actions that read/write this Chan. in this case you can go further and add to this actions incrementing/decrementing MVar counter. but even without tests it's evident that 1000 producer threads will get 1000 times more attention than 1 consumer thread if you don't have any restrictions on producing and consuming data. if you absolutely don't want to use MVars instead of channels, then at least you can modify these actions so that number of Chan elements will be limited (use additional "MVar full" which is filled in case of too large number of elements in channel and emptied by logger thread) -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:bulatz@HotPOP.com