thx for the fast answer!
the reason I did not post "source data structure" is that I wanted to see if Perl has solutions...
The data field I am concerned about is a mysql "text" field called "description" and may contain long text. The other is just the according id. The rest is index and fetched via sphinx.
And regarding speed: never fast enough :) as "first come first serve" is the fixed sorting order and we have to be faster than the others :)