How large will @$vars be? If larger than a hundred elements or so, you will benefit from a Schwartzian transform:

my @sorted_vars = 
  map { $_->[1] }
  sort { $a->[0] cmp $b->[0] }
  map { [ lc $_, $_ ] } @{$vars};

[download]

I'm afraid I'm as out of ideas as the other posters here -- your only recourse is to use a profiler and find the bottlenecks that way.

In reply to Re^3: Speed up hash initialization loop by Anonymous Monk
in thread Speed up hash initialization loop by austinj

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