>I want to keep the hashes functional

as I told you further down you can use Tie::Hash to keep the interface functional.

IMHO there are no general solutions faster than storable ! *

You need to provide more infos.

If your php is calling your perlscript you should check if you can hold the data structure in memory.

You may also check if you're not running into RAM problems causing massive swappings.

I once speeded up a program just by trasforming a huge hash into a hash of hashes (by halving the keys). Since the system only retrieved the sub-hashes actually needed from disk swap, I had a fantastic speed gain.

If this is transferable to your case is unknown since you do not provide enough infos...

Footnote: (*)

from Storable

"SPEED
The heart of Storable is written in C for decent speed. Extra low-level optimizations have been made when manipulating perl internals, to sacrifice encapsulation for the benefit of greater speed."

IMHO it's evident that you need to invest brain to achieve further speed gains!

In reply to Re^3: Fast(er) serialization in Perl by The Perlman
in thread Fast(er) serialization in Perl by mrguy123

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.