I'm working (as a developer that's relatively new to the project) on making a bulletin board more efficient in speed and memory. For its configuration files, it uses mostly executeable Perl code. These files don't change too often.

I was wondering about the efficiency of requiring in a configuration file versus opening it, reading it, and closing it. To make things more interesting, the built-in open and close routines aren't used. It uses subroutines that provide file-locking and more instead. Using a database isn't an option, as the board uses flatfiles for everything and it makes no sense to require a database.

Also, if using Perl code as options is better, should I use Data::Dumper or a similar module instead of building up the options (which are just strings and mostly true or false) without it?

P.S. if you recommend a module, it needs to run on the old 5.004-ish versions, and with a pure-Perl implementation.

Edit1: Thought of more stuff to add.

In reply to Using Perl files for options versus flatfiles? by AK108

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