Thank for your reply, I was not aware of the cache option on search.

In my case, it would not be useful. The reason I am keeping the strings I am watching for in a database is that I want to be able to change them from time to time without restarting my perl process or the external process I am watching the output of. If I cached the search query results, or flattened them to a hash then they would no longer reflect changes in the database.