blob versus file

Hi there, I am wondering if anybody has experiance in saving images to blob in mysql. I do save images with 1 K and 4 KB to blob fields while I used to save them to file. It seams to me that this is much slower accessing the files. The images take a bit (really short but absolutly noticable) to show up on the site. Is there a way to improve the performance, and why is this happening? I thought the performance might even boost after storing them to blobs. Thank you for any comments on that, Andy PS: I was planing to store all the other images (20 - 50 KB) to blobs as well (thousands) but after this first experiance I am a bit confused if the performance would even more suffer. Would you guys recommend this?