Paraffin inhibitors are chemicals that are used to reduce deposition of paraffin/wax onto surfaces of flow lines. For some crude oil production systems, paraffin inhibitors can provide significant reduction in wax deposition and be an economically attractive means for increasing production and/or decreasing wax remediation control costs. Paraffin inhibitors function by incorporating into wax deposit structures, altering the deposit structure in order to reduce the deposits' ability to adhere. Generally, effective inhibitors create weaker deposits which are more susceptible to removal from shear forces in the flow field. As such, the performance of the inhibitors can be related to the shear forces present in respective flow streams. In this paper, results of coldfinger experiments using four Gulf of Mexico crude oils are presented to illustrate the effect of shear on inhibitor performance. Trends from the data indicate that inhibitor performance improves with increasing shear. From the test results, the percent inhibition in the amount of depositing wax (for inhibitor treated crude oil tests compared to untreated crude oil tests) was consistently observed to increase with increasing shear in the various experiments. The amount of coldfinger surface area bare of deposition was similarly found to consistently increase with increasing shear. The percent inhibition of the amount of total deposit weight (deposited wax with entrained crude oil) did not always increase with increasing shear though-even decreasing in many cases. This is not related to a reduction of inhibitor performance but rather due to variation in the untreated deposit reference with shear. As the amount of entrained crude oil in a deposit decreases with increasing shear, the percent change on the total deposit weight (deposited wax plus entrained crude oil) will vary for a paraffin inhibitor's effect on a fixed amount of deposited wax species.