You shell out multiple times. The performance of the Perl code seems inconsequential.

This post will cover some cleanups (but leaves the important question of parallelism unanswered).

I don't think

map { $1 if /^\w+:\s+(\w+)\b/ }
[download]

has a defined behaviour. You want

map { /^\w+:\s+(\w+)\b/ }
[download]

And the grep { /^\w+:/ } is completely redundant.

Backticks returns the captured output as lines in list context, so

split /\n/, `gst-inspect-1.0`
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can be replaced with

`gst-inspect-1.0`
[download]

It's not equivalent since it leaves the line feeds in, but that's not an issue for you.

Cleaned:

my %plugins =
    map { $_ => scalar `gst-inspect-1.0 $_` }
        map { /^\w+:\s+(\w+)\b/ }
            `gst-inspect-1.0`;
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my %plugins =
    map { /^\w+:\s+(\w+)\b/ ? $1 => scalar `gst-inspect-1.0 $1` : () }
        `gst-inspect-1.0`;
[download]

> shell out
Concur, dr. If this external "binary" is a perl program, OP is committing great shame in not at least crafting a modulino and using the functionality in the same process as a simple library call.

> shell out Concur, dr. If this external "binary" is a perl program, OP is committing great shame in not at least crafting a modulino and using the functionality in the same process as a simple library call.

it is shameful to call shame

or promote modulino

This specific example deals with the command gst-inspect-1.0. You don't need to know what it does, just this. Calling gst-inspect-1.0 without arguments returns a list of plugins. Calling gst-inspect-1.0 with a plugin name returns information about that specific plugin. Each call to gst-inspect-1.0 takes about half a second, give or take (so surprisingly long).

I further noticed that you are not checking errors when running this external command. A well-behaved command should exit code zero on success, 1-255 for failure, further writing a clear error message to stderr (but you are not checking for any of this).

Googling found this gst-inspect-1.0 command. Is that the one you are using? From its description:

gst-inspect-1.0 is a tool that prints out information on available GStreamer plugins, information about a particular plugin, or information about a particular element. When executed with no PLUGIN or ELEMENT argument, gst-inspect-1.0 will print a list of all plugins and elements together with a summary. When executed with a PLUGIN or ELEMENT argument, gst-inspect-1.0 will print information about that plug-in or element.

To give you a feel for where I'm coming from, have a look at these old nodes:

• Calling External Commands More Safely by haukex
• The problem of "the" default shell by afoken
• Re^2: Having to manually escape quote character in args to "system"? by salva (compares how Windows and Unix parse the command line)

As you can see, running external commands safely, robustly, portably and efficiently is surprisingly tricky.

First, run the script as it is with top in another window. We will need to know if gst-inspect-1.0 is actually burning half a second or so of CPU time or just spending most of its time blocked for some strange reason. If it is "blocky", running many instances in parallel will result in a huge performance improvement. If it is wasteful, running many instances in parallel will only help to the limit of your available hardware threads.

A better option may be to cache the gst plugins in a simple database. There is an SDBM module bundled with Perl that provides tied persistent hashes with a few limitations, most notably that each record (key and value) can be no larger than about 1KB. There are other DBM modules also available, but SDBM is self-contained and the others require relevant libraries be available when Perl is built.

If DBM is insufficient or unavailable, DBI provides SQL database bindings, with the DBD::SQLite backend bundling the required SQLite.

I have used both SDBM and SQLite in the past, with the deciding factor being the application. Since you do not mention what you seek to accomplish, I cannot really recommend one over the other for you.