my thinking was to just devide the data up into threads and have each thread work on a part of the data at a time. whether this be one cpu or several. one thread could be listening and deligating and other threads could be doing the rest of the work. not sure how much processor power it would take but originally i was just thinking about the network sort of just passing messages with each bot having its own processor internally. and handling it itself or maybe having the network do the work and pass text to the bot . joe