variable assignment causes page to load slowly

Hello, For the past 3 weeks I've been banging my head against a wall while trying to figure out why the seemingly simplest line of code slows down the loading of my site by 30 seconds or more. I've tried everything I can think of to fix this, but nothing has worked. This includes new and older versions of PHP, Apache, MySQL, etc. If somebody could offer some suggestions I would appreciate it. Now to the problem. I use PHPLIB with PHP 3.0.7. The offending line of code is: $auth->auth["uid"] = "some string"; This line gets run, among other things, when a user first hits the site and a session is started. The problem is that this line for some reason causes the site to load extremely slowly. If I remove this line everything works fine! I don't think it's a PHPLIB issue, since similar code works fine on other sites we have. However, if I put that line into a simple script that doesn't even use PHPLIB, then there is no issue at all. So maybe it is PHPLIB-related, but I'm not sure because I've gotten contradictory results in all of my testing. What could be the problem? I've never encountered anything like this before. I didn't receive a response on the PHPLIB list, so I figured I'd try here. Thanks Philip