Strange behaviour of generated images

Hi, I'm trying to output a set of image thumbnails in HTML table. Everything works fine, except that performance is very poor. If I put all the thumbnails as regular files in some directory it has expected speed. But if I'm trying to use script to retrieve thumbnails from their actual location (which may be database for example) speed drops down dramatically. And what is even more strange, from apache log I see that script is terminating very fast, less than 0.5 second for each image (they are relatively small, ~2K), but browser is spending huge amount of time "downloading" images two at a time. Image retrieving script is very simple: <?php $expires = 24 * 60 * 60; $gm_expires = gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', time() + $expires); header("Cache-control: public, max-age=$expires, pre-check=$expires"); header("Expires: $gm_expires GMT"); $filename = DATA_DIR . '/' . $_REQUEST['ID']; $fp = @fopen($filename, 'r') or die ("Cannot open file $filename"); $story = fread($fp, filesize ($filename)); $packet = new Packet($story); $content_type = substr($packet->value('IMAGE_FILENAME'), -3); header("Content-type: image/$content_type"); header("Content-length: ". strlen($packet->value('IMAGE_REGULAR'))); echo $packet->value('IMAGE_THUMBNAIL'); fclose($fp); exit; ?> and call for images is made like this: echo "<a href='$url' target='story'><img src='show_image.php?ID=$id&s=0' width=65 border=0></a>"; Does anyone has such a problem before and is there any solution? Thank you, Victor. -- Infodesk S.A. Gustavo Mejia Ricart #70 Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic