Of course I know you're not suppose to rely on hash order but would two hashes with the same keys return in the same order? I would think so but don't know (And don't have time to test) but if it did you could skip the sort. But it probably would be a bad idea.

In the current Perl 5 implementation of hashes, you cannot rely of ordering of keys. You may get two canonically identical hashes, which should appear the same, but compare differently without a sort. If the elements were inserted in different sequences, you can see this.

Try comparing { foo => 1, bar => 5 } with { bar => 5 , foo => 1 }.

See also this thread