I am loading a 80000+ lines from a file in a hash ... i executed the same script in windows and linux,aix.. the script in windows (along with some other pre and post processing) took about 25 seconds ..and on linux it took 135 seconds !. I profiled the code and observed that on unix the loading of hash takes about 85% of time and on windows it took less than 50% ... Is this the default behaviour ..hash slower on unix ??