A system to collect and store in a special data structure arranged for rapid searching massive amounts of data. Performance metric data is one example. The performance metric data is recorded in time-series measurements, converted into unicode, and arranged into a special data structure having one directory for every day which stores all the metric data collected that day. The performance metric data is collected by one or more probes running on machines about which data is being collected. The performance metric data is compressed prior to transmission to a server over any data path. The data structure at the server where analysis is done has a subdirectory for every resource type. Each subdirectory contains text files of performance metric data values measured for attributes in a group of attributes to which said text file is dedicated. Each attribute has its own section and the performance metric data values are recorded in time series as unicode hex numbers as a comma delimited list. Analysis of the performance metric data is done using regular expressions. For speed, cache memory is used. Performance metric data outside the start time and end time named by the user on a query screen is eliminated before the regular expression is applied.