The YAML read takes about .5 seconds in this case -- it's there in the timings in my original post, and has been discussed already. That's the single big chunk of time, other than loading the modules. However, the application depends on manual editing of that file as well as automated reading/writing, so changing it to a binary format would require me to develop a whole new application for the "manual editing", so that's low on my priorities.

Is File::stat particularly big? I could work around dropping that. I'll look/test that; I'm not hopeful, though, the .pm file is only 2.8k, plus it pulls in Class::Struct which is 18.7k. I guess if nothing else pulls in Class::Struct that might be of some significance.