What performance should you expect from Perl? Fantastic amazing astonishing performance! Perl is very fast. If your program is slow, it will almost certainly be due to your database design or program architecture.

I have built some large systems in Perl and Java, and without knowing the specifics of your system I can only give you a few pieces of general advice:

• Use persistent database connections. Opening database connections is slow.
• Communication between processes and machines is often a bottleneck.
• Plan for caching, but don't actually build any until you see which parts run slowly.

And, as Ovid pointed out, don't waste time optimizing your code for performance until you have a working system.