why is qmail-inject working so slow?

[133tcamel]

Hi,
I've been using the following perl script to add messages to qmail's queue.. the system works fine but it takes about 10 mins to inject 3000 messages.. I'm not talking about the delivery part, just that part where qmail-inject takes a message and add its in the queue..

Here, is the perl code:

  for (1 .. 3000)
  {
    open(QMAIL, "|/var/qmail/bin/qmail-inject") or (print "Can't fork for qmail: $!\n" and sleep 10);
    print QMAIL $EMAILS{$_}; #contains all the form, subject, etc...
    close(QMAIL) or warn "qmail didn't close nicely";
  }

the above snippet even when run as the root as a cron job takes about 10 mins to queue 3000 messages.. I have rackspace dedicated server with the following specs:
Hard Drive 1 : 18GB SCSI
Hard Drive 2 : 18GB SCSI
Special Case : 2U Case
Bandwidth : 30GB (30GB incld.)
Memory : 512MB ECC RAM
Operating System : RedHat Linux 7.2
RAID : SCSI RAID Controller
Processor : Single 866 Mhz in a Dual Motherboard

Do you know whats causing this (BTW I installed qmail using the life w/ qmail handbook and the queue/remote directory has 23 subdirectories

Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks,
san. ---
cheers!
san.