:Somewhat true, reading from the hard-drive uses more CPU but not all that much. Just a few extra instruction exchange in different levels of memory (including system bus) and of course there is the delay due to hard drive read lag. However, in practice that isn't all that much infact all of it does not even take a second.  
 :Keeping track of wikipedia requires quite a lot of RAM if you try to keep everything in memory. Just the list of IPs can suck up all the ram like there is no tomorow. The bot currently does not compare a given IP edit to all of the IP's stored. It follows a makeshift binary search tree model reading from a sorted system of folders and files (over several thousand files just for IPs. The bot does not even read admin lists, blacklisted pages if a minor edit is made by a user (NullC's bot covers sneaky vandalism so I dont worry about that as it requires direct access to wikipedia servers which I lack and NullC does not).  
 :Also the now 700+ lines of admin lists would not fit in a single memory variable on mirc which at most holds 1000 characters. Anything above is delcared an overflow and is ignored. A lot of admin usernames have a decent lenght. So it would take a number of variables just to take care of that. Since the start of the bots lifespan we had about 200 new admins. The growing list will require more and more variables which is increasingly harder to implement and keep track of compared to overwriting a single file. 
 :These are few of the many problems why I am hesitant to dump it all to memory. 
 :The primary reason of bots speed is because of my very very slow internet connection. I am yet to convince Brion/Tim to allow me to host the bot on the wikipedia servers which would make the bot reliable however would also make it hard to update. 
 :|@