If you suddenly see a notably drop in performance, it's most likely you have hit the treshold where it starts swapping. I'm a bit surprised that you hit the limit so soon, what are you storing in your hash? 
    use Devel::Size 'total_size';
    my %hash = map {$_, rand() . ""} 1 .. 100_000;
    print total_size(\%hash), "\n";
    __END__
    7713194

[download]
That's less than 8Mb, which shouldn't be much of a problem on a modern machine.

But fact is, Perl is memory hungry. The more structures you have, the more memory you use. The more complex the structures are, the more memory you use.

Speeding it up is only possible by using less memory at a time. Using tie as you propose it is not going to solve it. If there would be a known way of speeding up hash access, it would already be in the core! Not to mention that tieing is a slow mechanism, as it means that for each hash access, no matter how trivial, a Perl subroutine will be called. It is possible to use the tie mechanism to store the hash on disk instead of memory, but unless you otherwise would run out of memory, that's not going to change your performance for the better. Regular disk access is not likely to be faster than accessing your swap area.

In reply to Re: Efficient giant hashes by Anonymous Monk
in thread Efficient giant hashes by crenz

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.