Nice meditation!

After a bit of review I realized that the problem was due to the way I was implementing the cache lookup. The process was essentially this: produce the union of four queries each of which returned a variable number of two field records, (the first number being a telephone prefix, and the second being an ID that represented its pricing model) then join that data together to form a string key that could be used in a hash lookup to determine if the data was already in the cache.

Some other ideas:

• use the queries themselves as the key into the cache instead of the results
• since most of the data is sorted already, instead of just pushing onto the end, insert them at the correct place
• and, inspired by a recent QOTW ... it shouldn't matter that the data are sorted asciibetically, just that they're sorted the same way each time. So you can do something like this:

  use List::Util qw(shuffle);
  my $alphabet = join '', shuffle 'a'..'z';  # do this only once and sav
  +e it to a file for later reading
  
  my $t;
  @union = map { $_->[1] }
           sort { $a->[0] cmp $b->[0] }
           map { eval "(\$t = lc \$_) =~ tr/$alphabet/a-z/"; [ $t, $_ ] 
  +}
           @union;
  [download]

  Not sure if there's a win there or not, but it's interesting anyway :)

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