$ perl -wle'use Time::HiRes "time"; my $start = time; while (10000 > keys %t) { ++$t{time()-$start} } print "total time ", time()-$start; use List::Util "sum" ; print "avg iterations per reported time ", sum(values %t)/keys(%t)' total time 11.0990000963211 avg iterations per reported time 20.3936