I just got some advice from a Linux guru. He suggested that all of the variables take milliseconds to access, even the ones in the beginning of the file that appear to take microseconds. The...
Before I forget, I'm running on a RedHat 5 box with the following uname -a output:
Linux gnc141c 2.6.18-53.el5 #1 SMP Wed Oct 10 16:34:19 EDT 2007 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux