when I originally ran my program the system slowed down and became sluggish.

Then I think you are attributing the slowdown to the wrong cause. Perhaps if you posted the code, we could suggest an alternative reason for it.

That is why I was trying to graph the file directly and not from an array. Do you know if this is possible?

It is certainly possible. GD::Graph just does some math on the arrays and then calls the graphic primitives in GD to do the drawing. You could do this yourself, perhaps picking apart GD::Graph as your starting point. It would require two passes of the data.

But, as I pointed out above, 8640 data points is a trivial amount of data, and cannot be the reason for the "slow down and sluggishness", so it's unlikely that just making this change would achieve the result you are looking for. One has to suspect that there is some other aspect of your code that is responsible for the problem you are seeking to fix. And if you fixed that problem, there would be no need to role your own graphing solution to avoid the use of arrays.

Who knows, maybe its just the computer....

Computers are amazingly consistant. It is much more likely to be your unshown code...