get_currentuserinfo() performance question

Hello Everybody! (I feel like Dr. Nick from ‘the Simpsons.’)

Ok, I force people to log into my blog to view certain categories (because I’m a sadist), and as a cheap reward I thought it appropriate to echo out that person’s name in the header of the blog.

“Welcome [USER_NAME]! Thank you for bothering to log into my site for otherwise petty reasons.”

So anyways, in my header, I’m using the following code to get the current user’s information.

<?php global $current_user;
get_currentuserinfo(); ?>

and printing it out with something like:

echo $current_user->user_login

Doing this has increased the blog page load time by three-fold, at least.

So, I was wondering if there were any better ways — perhaps doing this once and storing that information in a cookie and using that on each subsequent page load — or —

is there already a cookie generated by wordpress’s login with the information that I’m looking for (the user’s name) stored on the client’s computer?

To those that may respond, I want to you to know that I love you and I will do anything for you as long as it doesn’t inconvienince me or cause me to go out of my way in the least bit.

Really, Thanks. ??