Precisely, that's what I was looking for, instinct and experience. This program that I talk about is a mere example, just looking for any issues on performance when perl compiles large pieces of code. Yes, you're right one of the bottlenecks is the initial DB calls for each instruction (user, session, event control) plus any more that the code requires to return a result to the calling module.

As more "lower level" stuff gets tacked on to each instruction yes, time to response will certainly slow down, though I thought that if perl has to compile 5-6 megs of plain text files for each instruction my immediate thought would be the fact that it would slow the program down where only 200k of that code is relevant.

Certainly makes sense chromatic! Thanks for the reply.