there's a big amount of strings that need to be processed(the split and store in some data structure thing), so storing it in a hash is not very optimal, turns out from the benchmarks an array would be faster. but I was expecting pack/unpack to be faster since it just packs it into a very simple datastructure and then unpacks it the same way, not needing so complex data structures such as hashes/arrays, instead.. it would just store everything as binary data. so that's why I was expecting that to be faster.