I approve the design of the applet. The load on the metaservers would be minimal. I'd also like you to consider a change to the client vs metaserver protocol, that I have considered for some time. A sort of subscription mode, where the metaserver keeps a memory of clients that have requested updates, and sends updates to them that it receives from servers ... that is to say it will retransmit what it has already sent if the values have changed in anything bar information age. Clients would be forgotten by the metaserver once they haven't been heard from for five minutes. So clients would be expected to resubscribe every few minutes. -- James Cameron mailto:quozl at us.netrek.org http://quozl.netrek.org/