Hi Sergio, Which version of the ERG are you using? And by  ``don't use the -packing option'', do you mean setting -packing to 7? or 0? or leave it as default? Do you sill have -nsolutions=10 when you ``don't use the -packing''. If -nsolutions is set to be non-zero, the -packing is defaulted to be 15. I just experimented with the ERG nov-06. It seems that without packing, the parser hits the memory limit very soon and aborts. Similar situation is observed for packing with exhaustive unpacking (-packing=7 and/or -nsolutions=0). With selective unpacking (-packing=15 -nsolutions=10), the parser seems to be struggling to unpack within the memory limit. However, due to the huge search space, it seems to take forever. I'm really not sure this is actually a bug in the selective unpacking code. But in case the above configuration is different from what you have meant, do correct me :-) To PET developers, maybe we need some extra mechanism to control the behavior of the parser, say a time-out option? Best, Yi <div>On 7/11/07, Sergio Roa <<a href="mailto:sergior@coli.uni-sb.de" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"> sergior@coli.uni-sb.de</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Hello, I am  using the  svn repository version  of cheap, with  the following options: cheap -limit=100000 -tok=fsr -packing=15 -nsolutions=10 When I try to parse the ambiguous sentence: "It 's hard  to explain to a 17-year-old why someone  they like had to go," says Mrs. Ward. the cheap  process takes  many hours in  the process of  unpacking. I wonder why this happens. When  I don't use the -packing option I get the results  in short  time. Thanks, Sergio. </blockquote></div>