FYI... or leprechauns

[Josh Mellicker]

Running the following code (in a loop):

get URL ("binfile:" & tLocal)
put the base64encode of the md5digest of it into tLocalMD5

on 103 files (most of them 10 - 30 MB QT files):

  - took 6 minutes
  - slowed the whole computer to a crawl- really hard to access email,  
browser, etc.


However, changing this code to this single line:

put the base64encode of the md5digest of (URL ("binfile:" & tLocal))  
into tLocalMD5

  - took 3 minutes
  - computer was responsive, other apps behaved fairly normally



One theory being circulated is that the first block of code had to  
load the entire file (a 20 MB QT movie, for example) into memory,  
whereas the second read the file from the disk.

My theory is that we have gone mad, or there are leprechauns.

Which is it?