I was curious so I took the same code, added a timer, and ran it on win32. It took 10 seconds. However, I'm running a 1.8 Pentium M, 1G of memory, WinXP, ActivePerl 5.8.6.

I suspect that nite_man does not have as beefy of a box as you do. It might be acceptable if the look up doesn't occur frequently.

In retrospect, it wasn't a good test since the system specs weren't the same and I'm not fimilar with the whole problem. But it was a good 30 second distraction. :)

For the curious:

#!perl -w

use strict;

my $startTime = time();

my %lookupTable;

for (my $i=0; $i<=2000000; $i++) {
        if (!$lookupTable{$i}) {
                $lookupTable{$i} = 1;
        }
}

my $totalTime = time() - $startTime;
print "Total Time: $totalTime\n";
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