As for your question about number of tries. It's hard to say for sure as i dont know what kind of data you get when there are multiple tries, but i would reccommend using an array of hashrefs instead of searching for "try_".$x."_foo"

here is part of such a astructure(assumimg that some info will be the same for all tries)

$VAR435 = 273118;
$VAR436 = {
             jobtype => 'immediate',
             try => 1,
             group => '',
             subtype => 1,
             filelistcount => 1,
             status => '0',
             tries=>
                      [
                        { server => 'netbackup2',
                          ended => '1031010812',
                          statuscount => 12,
                          stunit => 'netbackup2_stu'
                         },
                         
                        { server => 'netbackup3',
                          ended => '1031010813',
                          statuscount => 13,
                          stunit => 'netbackup3_stu'
                         }
                       ]
                         
             
          }
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In this case you'd be able to loop through the hashes in @{$data{273118}{tries}} to make your tables. In many cases a good place to start optimizing and simplifying is in the code that generates your datastructure.