If you don't know it already, perl 5.8.0 was released earlier this week. It now uses it's own IO subsystem (perlio) by default instead of the system's. I've already gleened one serious improvement from it... If you've been using String::IO or tied handles to create in-memory files, you should check out the ':scalar' layer.

my $buf;
open( $fh, "+<:scalar", \$buf );

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My early benchmarks show it to be 10x faster than a simple buffer created with tie and 20x faster than String::IO! I'm testing out a copy of Apache::Filter I hacked up to replace the tied handle with the ':scalar' layer and the improvement is quite dramatic:)

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Re: perl 5.8.0 perlio
by vladb (Vicar) on Jul 20, 2002 at 17:04 UTC
    My early benchmarks show it to be 10x faster than a simple buffer created with tie and 20x faster than String::IO!

    Sounds interesting.. I'd appreciate it if you could post your benchmark code.

    I haven't yet looked at perl 5.8.0 but looking at comments made by other developers the improvements are quite exciting. For one, I believe that Perl's use of it's own IO subsystem in place of that provided by the underlying OS will make Perl even more platform independant.

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    # Under Construction

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      Well, yet again I've posted as the AM by mistake, and cannot edit my node:( So, one correction, everywhere I wrote String::IO, that should of course be IO::String.

      Now, here's the benchmarks...

      Read more... (3 kB)
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