Last night, falling asleep, I likened the problem to a surgeon, who has patients (images) coming into theatre and every time he needs to do a certain operation (method), he has to get an assistant to run downstairs to the store room (text file) to fetch a prosthetic/ new limb (new colour palette). Should the surgeon have a supply of new limbs at hand (array of new color palette), he would be able to process the job a lot quicker.
I would be grateful if someone could shed some light on how classes are parsed by the php engine, cos it seems that the text file has been read once and is already in memory somewhere - hence the fast retrieval speeds (to me anyway) of c. 1 ms. If this is the case, then waheeeh! Happy Xmas! And if not Happy Xmas anyway.
Kind Regards
Malcolm