I've been tasked to write a .vbs file to scan a local directory and ftp files to various locations.

I've been handed a few files which do roughly the same thing on which to base my script.

Now, the code I've been given makes repeated calls to an ini file to determine path settings etc. When it reads the ini file it reads the whole lot into a variable and then does a series of instr() to find the section it's looking for.

If I was developing this from scratch I would have loaded all this information into a handful of global variables at the start as I always feel repeated file reading like this is an unnecessary overhead.
Obviously having dozens of large variables loaded would be undesirable but at what point does it become better to read the settings as required rather than pre-load all the info?