hi,

i am trying to find out why my program went so slow, but i can t find 
out why IO#read is the bottleneck.
here is the profiler output:

   %   cumulative   self              self     total
  time   seconds   seconds    calls  ms/call  ms/call  name
  98.52    19.29     19.29      107   180.26   180.26  IO#read

(AMD 1800+ reading 110 files from system, 192 kb each, on win32 )
19.29 that cant be!! should be not more than 3 seconds in worst case.
it was that fast before i played around, but i can t think of something 
i did wrong.
the problem is maybe not in my program code, because i isolated the 
loading routine and its still that slow.

i am reading in the files like this:
if FileTest.exist? filename
	f = File.new filename
	f.binmode
	data = f.read
end


rebooting the computer didn t help, there is enough memory ...
.... i really don t understand what s going on.

maybe one of you can open my eyes, or maybe one of you happened to 
experience a similar case.
thanks for help, Meinrad