Howdy!
Your problem is most likely not really related to perl, it is a filesystem thing, where lookups are made in linear time with regards to the number of files in a directory
I've run into what I think is similar behavior. I have some
CDs that have something like 11,000 files on them, all in
a single directory. On a Windows or MacOS 9 box, I saw
excruciatingly slow access times for files down in the
list. The first few hundred were plenty zippy, but the
farther I got into the list, the slower the access.
Doing the same access on a Solaris box or MacOSX yielded
pleasantly surprising results. File lookups were more
like constant time instead of proportional to how far into
the list the name was.
I suspect that the problem is exacerbated by using a
"slow" medium, like CD-ROM or network volumes.
yours,
Michael | 