You will really have to profile where the delay is: in making the connection, preparing the query, returning the query-results or objectifying these results. The speed of preparing the query and returning the query-results are of course network and/or server-determined and there is not much DBIx::Class can do here. Rewriting the query, using indexes, ... are all good techniques for speeding-up the record retrieval.

If you have a really huge amount of data to retrieve, paged retrieval can be considered, so you don't get all the data in one bunch, but in separate "pages"