dbkid,

I have an HP9000 L2000 server with dual 440 processors.

The database is the only thing running on this machine.

I do not remember the drop taking that much processor to
complete, but it has been a little while.

The tablespace scheme that I am using on the new temp
tablespace is as follows:

initial extent 512K
next 512K
min 1024K

For each datafile use autoextend with 1024K as increment
and max file size set at 500MB. I currently have 6 datafiles
for this tablespace. If you limit the filesize to 500MB, you
won't have problems moving/copying the file if needed.

You should also check your sort_area_size parameter.
If it is set too low, you will start sorting in the temp tablespace (thus the file getting large).

I have 2GB Ram on that machine and set the sort_area_size
to 4MB. Have only really hit the temp tablespace once.
An application programmer at the company ran a query
that was looking (sorting) nearly 20Million records.

Hope this info helps!

Scott Matthesen