Please check if DBI is really the bottle neck and if yes - then I would really look more into the MySQL configuration. You may check DBI::Profile to profile the DBI or insert test data to check the time spent on the data inserts. Otherwise I would suggest to use Devel::Profile. My guess is that there are a lot more performance problems related to the parsing. Something which might have a big performance impact is if you have lots of functions which return lists/hashs. It is better to return references instead of lists/hashes. From my experience the Perl threading implementation is better than most people think - but it is cumbersome, because the debugger can not be used well.