Yes, it is efficient. It's not
fast. It does several things that no other DBM (that I know of) does:
- It handles nested Perl hashes and arrays to any level
- The file is ftp'able across OSes and endian-ness
- It is Pure-Perl, which means it's easily deployed on Windows
- If you use the tie interface, you only make a change in one place in your program and the rest of your program thinks it's using a regular variable.
Hence, given what I know about your problem, this sounds like a really good first-pass to see if memory thrashing is your root issue.
My criteria for good software:
- Does it work?
- Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?