>>I wish to send this program to someone for a quick review... I had the original code (procedural) which I converted to a class. I made couple of other speed improvements. However, it doesn't seem enough. I'm not sure what else can I optimize.
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>Converting it to a method of a class only slows it down.

Yes, looks like it. All my efforts of optimizing the code led to decreasing the speed so far. Or it seems so.