bopm timing out with latest ratbox

One of our bopms is running on a ratbox (hybrid-7 fork) server and after
the server was upgraded to the latest release of ratbox the bopm often
times out. The ratbox developers suggests the problem is irc_read() only
reading one byte at a time and the bopm is being flooded with data (this
is an EFnet server with 10k+ clients so it's seeing quite a few
connects)

What's your opinion on this and is there a chance irc_read() will be
rewritten to be more effective?

Regards
Chrille@EFnet