Gtk icons caching

[Jacob Kroon <d00jkr efd lth se>]

I've straced a few Gtk-applications, and noticed a behaviour I wanna
inquery about. I am running Fedora Rawhide, which includes Gtk+ 2.6.4 as
of 2005-04-06, and what is bothering me is the icon "cache" or whatever
the thing that handles icon rendering. Using Firefox it takes about a
second to open the menues the first time, and stracing seems to show
that this is due to stat64():ing all of the current Gtk-themes icons.
This seems to be a general behaviour for all Gtk-applications.
Applications which do not render any icons never have to do the
stat64()-thing it seems, and thus starts a hell of a lot faster on my 
system, which honestly is quite dated.

So my question is, couldn't the stat64-thing be made
application-independent, so that this is done only once, when the
Gtk-library is first initiated by a running application, so that
subsequent Gtk-applications wouldnt have to go through the same process?

Now, I am not a Gtk-expert in any way, so I already now apologize for
any incorrect statements in this mail, I can't even tell if this really 
is the bottleneck, I am just curious.

Regards Jacob