The things in @Messages should be qr//'ed regexes. That will definitely make your regex stuff go faster. (Or did you say you already did that?) And if you only use $key for subscripting the hash, why not change keys %hash to values %hash? That way you can avoid using $hash{$key} over and over and over again.

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Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;