Try using $replacex instead of $replace, where are you testing this, which server?
Since I Add people on join and remove people on part I found the need to use ini files for performance so
Tracking nicknames does not really require performance, only if you are tracking 80000+ nicknames at once. But the slowness before, was due to the while loop and the use of /write (which opens and closes the file each time you use it). INI files are stored in RAM and eventually flushed to the disk, which is why it's faster.
