These figures are consistent with another rather large Class::DBI project I'm involved with.

One of the things you could do is to subclass the _mk_column_accessors method, e.g.:

sub _mk_column_accessors {
    my $class = shift;
    my @new = grep {!exists &{$class."::$_"}} @_; # remember new ones
    $class->SUPER::_mk_column_accessors( @_ ); # accessors + mutators

# Redefine accessors to be very lean

    no warnings 'redefine';
    no strict 'refs';
    foreach (@new) {
        my $method = $class."::$_";
        my $old = \&$method;
        *$method = sub {
# if not available yet, got fetch with normal accessor
            return $old->( @_ ) unless exists $_[0]->{$_};
            $_[0]->{$_};
        };
    }
} #_mk_column_accessors
[download]

Further optimizations with the accessors could be made if you know 100% sure that when a subclss Class::DBI object is created, all the fields are fetched from the database (bij setting all of the fields to be "Essential"). Something like:

sub _mk_column_accessors {
    my $class = shift;
    eval "sub  ${class}::$_ { \$_[0]->{'$_'} }"
     foreach grep {!exists &{$class."::$_"}} @_;
    $class->SUPER::_mk_column_accessors( @_ );
} #_mk_column_accessors
[download]

Please note that I've used a string eval here for a reason: benchmarks have shown that accessors created that way are the fastest accessors possible (just as if writing them manually). All other solutions use a closure, which are inherently slower. And since speed is what you're interested in here... ;-)

Hope this helps.

Liz