Thanks for all those suggestions, I have implemented chop so far and got a solid 25% saving, even with overhead of reverse. Very worthwhile. Program run time is 5 minutes as one-off, 45 minutes in a full test suite, so 25% is good saving

The responders who mentioned I didn't give much context are of course correct, but I chose brevity. I have all sorts of requirements re scanning the protein strings, and I'm happy with my regexp scans, index's, other such things that use the structure of a ~20 character peptide sequence within the ~400 character protein, those are pretty ok and are not topping the list in the FastProf profile, just the areas where I do a dumb-as-hell one character at a time scan. These inlcude things like scanning all the proteins and looking for an essentially arbitrary logic in the strings, ie. break the protein (as per Trypsin protease) at a K or R, and count the S,T.Y residues in each segment. I don't think there's any way to speed that up with pre-processing and clever mapping and saving results for re-use, you just have to come up with the world's best way to scan down strings one char at a time. That's my take aayway.

I'll keep looking at your replies though, thanks again.