The first thing you should do when trying to speed something up is profile it (with something like Devel::DProf) to see what's taking it so long. If it's loading all the modules, something like pperl or a Perl compiler will help. If it's loading the data, maybe a different data structure would help.

In general, getting your users to minimize your app instead of exiting it should help no matter what's causing the slowness.