Hi,

Resuming...

Can you provide with more code, basically important stuff is not shown, like construct_the_customers_template, sned_customer_mail, mark_the_flag_in_msgdb.

If you want to profile where it's spending time, you have a lot of options like Devel::DProf, or for timing, a nice one Benchmark::Stopwatch.

I think the db stuff can be improved a lil'bit, not only in speed also in quality, see statement handler, mark_the_flag can also be an already prepared statement...

Mail stuff, as someone pointed out already, I would decouple it from your main script, by queuing it into a local SMTP server.

About what happen inside of ...customers_template function, I hope you're using a fast templating system, or one at all, and not some home made not optimized at all ;-)

Regards,