Run your Perl code under the profiler and see where it is spending most time. Optimise those bits. Rinse, repeat.

http://www.perl.org/about/whitepapers/perl-profiling.html

Cheers,
R.

Based on the idea of removing modules from the overall package, I presume you're trying to optimize in terms of download size and/or hosting cost rather than speed.

A good compression algorithm should help a lot. Zip is ubiquitous but pretty weak.

Compressing plain text works better than compressing obfuscated or encrypted data. Check your build settings to see if you're making compression harder than it has to be.

If the volume of downloads is low, minimizing the size isn't so important. If the volume of downloads is high, consider making a torrent out of your package.

Do you really need to optimize it? Take a look at the code below.

unless (it is broken)
{
     don't fix it;
}
[download]

You could create a BingFarzPerl?

You pick/choose which modules to exclude using http://www.cavapackager.com/appdocs/projecttree-scan.htm

You could also use scandeps.pl to cross/reference and make sure you're not missing any modules

But don't count on saving much/if/any harddisk by excluding modules -- the dependency scans are pretty good , won't add extra files, might miss a dll here or there