No matter what programming language you use, inline functions are faster than subroutine calls. However, perl suffers no more overhead for subroutine calls than any other language. Breaking down an easy to read and update perl program just to squeeze a little speed out of it is the wrong way to do it. This is basically true of any language. The only time you want to sacrifice readablity and maintainability is when you have some computationally heavy code that you know will need tweeking. 20 function calles doesn't even come close.
That being said, your use of @options in the subroutine call poses a bit of a problem. Perl will copy this array, which, depending on its size, could incur some serious overhead. Pass the array by reference.
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Crulx
crulx@iaxs.net