Further thoughts:

• I suspect there's not too much merit in your *233/800 factor - those numbers are just raw processor Mhz numbers, many cycles will be wasted waiting for main memory and man, many more if disk IO is required.
• You could also use DB_File which is available via PPM from ActiveState and I believe uses the same API
• SDBM_File is a core perl module which also uses the same API, but has significant limitations on allowable size of data
• See also MLDBM which allows you to store complex data structures in a DBM hash