eff_i_g,
Presumably, your problem is one of performance though you never come out and say it. You haven't told us enough about how this datastructure works within the program to provide any ideas beyond just changing your data structure.

Here are some things to think about. Perhaps instead of changing the pipes into hashes (HoH), you could use arrays instead (HoA) as they take up less space. You don't indicate if having the entire data structure in memory at once is even necessary. One possibility would be to load only the portion of the structure necessary to do any unit of work at a time. While this will add I/O, it should allow you to trade memory for time since your memory requirements will now be manageable.

I have lots of other ideas but they are all what-ifs until you share more about how your program works and how the datastructure works within that program.

Cheers - L~R

In reply to Re^2: Moving from hashing to tie-ing. by Limbic~Region
in thread Moving from hashing to tie-ing. by eff_i_g

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.