Well, as I've noticed many times before, and as the hyperfine above shows, the actual startup cost of perl itself is not bad at all (a few msec). For me it's only these three modules that really bite (in particular Pod::Usage, unused, takes 50msec). I had no problem with, for example, Time::HiRes, Fcntl, or Sys::Hostname. In my case, I think it makes sense to replace the slow modules (though I'm still surprised they are that slow). I've tried pp to create an executable (which seems to be a self-extracting zip) and it ran about three times slower.