Devel::Peek::Dump is just a wrapper around dump.c Perl_do_sv_dump function, and after examining it I think it is an histogram of the keys per hash slot.

For your sample hash it means that there are 406794 slots with 0 keys, 382690 slots with 1 key, 182129 slots with 2 keys, etc.

That also means, that your idea of sorting the keys in every slot and then performing a merge is not going to have a great performance... though, you could degrade the hash to use just one slot while you are processing it.

In reply to Re: Devel::Peek hashref. by salva
in thread Devel::Peek hashref. by BrowserUk

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