You haven't said which platform your program is running on. There's a good chance that it's not the machine running your code that is bottlenecked, but the file server or the network.

On Win32, there are well known performance problems with the layers of the operating system involved in wildcard directory lookup (=globbing).

I've also seen the same scenario with NFS, but nowhere near as bad - in this case, the Unix box doing the file serving had some severe hardware problems of its own.

A way round this is to use FTP instead of a direct mapping, and Net::FTP to access the directories and files.

Update: Some CB corresponence with licking9Volts has established that the files are being served from a Unix box using Samba. IIRC, Windows has to have an image of the directory in memory before it can glob. If the directory is huge, then Windows thrashes in memory.

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