The market's recent 25% rally since its March 9 low has a good deal of cash coming home to roost. Nearly $50 billion has poured out of money-market mutual funds in roughly the last four weeks. But many brokers have cut their budgets and work forces since the economy took a severe downturn last fall, raising the question: Can they cope with a really big run-up? Long hold times and sluggish web sites won't cut it when skittish investors decide to jump back in.

We put some of the biggest brokerages and fund companies through the ringer by testing their call center response times. We also reviewed data on trade execution times. The results varied dramatically. The call times were averaged over a five day period with the average wait time coming in at just under 43 seconds. It took ShareBuilder, our quickest entrant, less than one-fifth the time it did Zecco, which was the slowest on our list. Meanwhile, independent research firm Gomez found it took WellsTrade, a division of Wells Fargo (WFC), almost 17 seconds to execute a trade, four times as long as Scottrade, the quickest, and an eternity to a sophisticated investor. Click here to see data from SmartMoney magazine's 2008 broker survey.

We center on these two metrics for good reason. As the market shows signs of recovery, trading volume is soaring as investors try to position themselves for a rebound. NYSE Euronext reported a 37% surge in total U.S. cash product volume in March vs. the year-ago period. The S&P 500 volume's spiked more than 50% in the two weeks after the market bottomed in early March.

And then there's all that cash kept on the sidelines by wary investors ($3.8 trillion in money market funds alone, according to the Investment Company Institute) just waiting to pour back into equities. In other words, if the recent gains or a spooky earnings season sparks an even broader rush to buy or sell, the flood of transactions could be staggering.

That means the systems and the people at brokerages and fund companies will need to be ready to meet the onslaught just as they emerge from cutting back costs in response to the poor economy. The ranks have shrunk at some of the biggest names in the brokerage business. Merrill Lynch lost about a thousand brokers, or 6%, in 2008 compared with 2007. Smith Barney shed about 1,100 brokers, or 8% of its force. And the combined brokerages of Wachovia and A.G. Edwards lost about 300 stock jockeys, or 2% of the total.

It's a similar story at some big fund companies. Though there's no industrywide tally, research firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas estimates that the some of the biggest fund companies have cut more than 12,000 jobs.

For example, fund giant Fidelity laid off 1,300 employees last fall and started another round of cuts in early February. Fidelity says the move is purely tactical: Demand for mutual funds drops in a bear market, which means fewer phone calls.

"Throughout this process, we have been committed to maintaining the resources necessary to provide the highest level of customer service," says Fidelity spokesman Vin Loporchio. Along with Fidelity, most fund companies say the impact of layoffs will be minimal. Some also point out that with the unemployment situation being what it is, it shouldn't be too hard to staff up again fairly quickly.

Of course financial-service companies are well aware that spikes in trading volume can occur and that customers expect the systems to be able to handle the flow. When the London Stock Exchange suffered a systems failure in the midst of a busy trading day last September, customers were outraged. Overall, however, the global trading infrastructure has handled the market's selloffs since the fall without incident.

Fortunately, it's not something that should keep investors awake at night, says Yakov Amihud, professor of finance at New York University's Stern School of Business. "No one knows how much capacity the system has," Amihud says. "But today many stocks can be traded on multiple platforms."

Where the U.S. differs from the LSE is that we have five "liquid, chunky" market centers (NYSE, NYSE Arca, Nasdaq, Bats and Direct Edge), says Jamie Selway, managing director at White Cap Trading and a market infrastructure expert. If a technical glitch caused one to go down, it's a pretty straightforward manner to fail over to those that are still up and running, Selway says.

Still, with the market rallying, SmartMoney repeatedly called around the major discount brokerages to see how their response times stacked up.

As the market was rallying 20% during March, we placed calls to each broker on five different days. Sharebuilder, part of Dutch financial giant ING Direct, took just 16 seconds to answer the phone. That could be an indication that the company is getting its act together after placing dead last between 16 discount brokerages on SmartMoney magazine's 2008 survey. Schwab benefits from its short and simple automated phone tree. Just press the "2" button and you're connected to a representative pretty much instantly.

Zecco, a site that offers commission-free trades, could learn a thing or two from Sharebuilder. It took Zecco operators 97 seconds on average to pick up the phone or five times as long as our best entrant. The last thing an anxious trader needs on a big market day is to listen to cheesy hold music while waiting for a Zecco representative. At one point we even thought we heard a Theremin.

Gomez Inc., a web performance monitoring company, tracked average response times every month throughout turbulent 2008. Gomez researchers measured the time it took to log into an existing account, fill out a trade ticket and preview without actually hitting "send." Interestingly, Charles Schwab (SCHW), which was one of the fastest to reach on the phone, is comparatively slow online.

Bank of America (BAC), on the other hand, is relatively slow on the phone but pretty quick on the web. In any case, if the market soars or plunges, those few extra seconds could add up to big money either made or lost.