[DGD] Reasonable Tick Counts?

[Kurt Nordstrom]

Been running into trouble lately with an "out of ticks" message in some
code I have to parse codes into ansi escape sequences for use in
communications.  Currently, I'm building off of a Melville base, and it
sets the default maximum tick count to 100000.  The function I have that
causes the overflow is a replace_str(str, original, new) function, that
replaces all instances of "original" in "str" with "new".

Is it reasonable to have to expect to increase the tick count here, or is
probably poor coding on my part?

And can anybody give me an idea of what a tick is anyhow?