Alternatively, if someone can suggest a good way to test the speed of a set of operations under perl, I could make some sort of program which did "a lot" (where a lot is defined as "enough to get numbers big enough on the clock to try and make a descision by them") of both types of operations, on the same dataset, over and over, to see if one method is appreciably faster.

But I don't know how to do that either. Thanks for your help.

-il cylic