Many of the CGI applications I have worked on spend a *lot* of time on print statements. On my machine, this code:

my $out='';
for (0..1000)
{
  $out .= "$_"." bottles of beer on the wall\n";
}
print $out;
[download]

is about six times faster than:

for (0..1000)
{
  print "$_"," bottles of beer on the wall\n";
}
[download]

Changing all the code to look this way is probably too much trouble. So here's an idea that is only three times faster than print:

package Print;
require Exporter;
@ISA = qw(Exporter);
@EXPORT_OK = qw(Print);

our $sout='';

sub Print
{
  $sout .= "@_";
}

END
{
  print $sout;
}
1;
[download]

Then change your code to call Print instead of print. This is a small change that can be applied in a batch fashion to all of your slow code to speed it up.

use Print qw (Print);
for (0..1000)
{
  Print "$_"," bottles of beer on the wall\n";
}
[download]

This hasn't been through a lot of testing, I just wrote it.

It is good practice to create some output for the user to look at early in your program, then buffer up the rest of the output that is slow to generate.

It should work perfectly the first time! - toma