Hi David, like my fellow monks said there is probably no easy way to make this hash smaller.
However, if you are worried the hash might become huge, and it is a hash you might need to use several times, a nice option is to use storable.
That way, you can load very big hashes in a very short time.
Good Luck
Guy

Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand and even harder to modify.