Right

It's a general rule that when you do OO-Perl and you use an AUTOLOAD method you should always explicitly define a DESTROY method as well (unless AUTOLOAD takes care of DESTROY, too); even an empty one.

Another trick that you could use to speed up things is to have AUTOLOAD install a method in the package namespace each time it is called. This was a trick that TheDamian explained in his book "Object Oriented Perl". Take a look at this node by Ovid to see how (or buy the book ;)