I liked your idea of adding a "baseline"!
I also really don't know either why generating the list of keys in the sub appears to be faster then giving the caller the ref and having him do it? I would have expected that difference to be smaller. Hopefully some other Monk knows?

However, the main point remains: If the caller needs the whole hash, give him a ref to a hash. This is much faster than passing the entire hash back as a list. Of course there are memory allocation issues with that because Perl will keep the memory for that hash allocated as long as there is reference to it.

Added: Except as a part of an object method, I don't know why a sub() in general would create a hash, only to just pass back just the keys? Seems a bit weird, but I'd also like to know why this appears to be somewhat faster.