prenote: The hint about expanding the memory pool to my much used VM was 
very helpful, my times are very consistient now.

My machine has a gigabyte of memory, about 750 of which is free and 
ready to run squeak, It would indeed be nice if Squeak could 
auto-calibrate itself to make use of available memory and, in this case, 
processors. ;)
...............................
I've had some good luck with the time profiler already, as noted in my 
previous message.

However, when I went on to the second method:

"ImageProcessor >> iterationsDo: "

It utterly fails to produce a useful tree. As you see, it calls 3 
"interesting" methods however, on the runs so far it has said, blythly, 
that 100% of the time is in "centerSurround" or "collapseArray". (count 
was 7) On one run, it failed to produce a tree at all!

#####################################
iterationsDo: count

count < 0 ifTrue: [self halt.  "usage error" ].
self centerSurround.

2 to: count do: [:i | 
    self collapseArray.
    self centerSurroundScaled.
    ].
#########################################