I can also understand it if merlyn (Randal Schwartz) types the top two lines of this optimization in his sleep

So do I. Which is the reason I commented. Yesterday someone said the same thing to me about another ST: is it really worth the effort and memory usage? What he said made sense: an ST uses a lot of memory and in many cases the win is too small to be relevant.

If trying to run it on a slower link, such as an SMB mounted share across the corporate campus

You may be right about this one. I don't know how SMB is implemented and whether any client side caching is (can be) done.

a per-hour cron job

In a per-hour cron job it doesn't matter. Even in a per-minute cron job, I'd argue that the difference between half a second and half a second is very small :)

Juerd
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