Hi, Lately when I make queries via biomaRt, they are onerously long as compared to before (last spring/early summer). For example, I frequently pull down the following information mart <- useMart("ensembl",dataset="hsapiens_gene_ensembl") WHAT <- c("ensembl_gene_id","ensembl_transcript_id", "chromosome_name", "strand", "exon_chrom_start", "exon_chrom_end", "rank", "ensembl_exon_id", "gene_biotype") anno <- getBM(WHAT, mart = mart, filters="ensembl_gene_id",values=unique(gene),verbose = FALSE) where I sometimes filter by gene (as indicated in the above code), or otherwise just bring it everything down. It was so fast to bring everything down, that I just automatically reran the code so as to make sure I was current (When I say fast, I don't have numbers, but much less than 15 minutes, I'm think). Now it's very slow -- the above code hasn't finished after an hour (unfortunately, I don't know how many genes it is because its the result of processing something and I don't know the results a priori). This has been my experience several times now (both with and without filtering on gene id) and I know someone else in my department has experienced the same thing without change of code. So my question is: Is there something about this set of values that makes it now very slow combination when it wasn't before? Would dropping a specific value(s) speed it up? Thanks, Elizabeth -- Elizabeth Purdom Assistant Professor Department of Statistics UC, Berkeley Evans Hall, Rm 433 epurdom at stat.berkeley.edu (510) 642-6154 (office) (510) 642-7892 (fax)