The time (assuming you are running a 64-bit Perl in your 7GB), is taken in two stages:

1. Allocating 6.8GB to hold the 100 million scalars on the stack;
2. Cleaning up 100 million scalars from the stack

If you want your Perl code to perform the same thing but more quickly, try this:

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use Time::HiRes qw[ time ];;
use List::MoreUtils qw/any/;

print time();

my @a;

$_== 92 and push @a, $_ and last for 1..10000000;

print time;

print @a;

__END__
C:\test>junk38
1325044379.166
1325044379.17017
92
[download]

That took just 0.00417 seconds on my machine.

Note that it is different from your C code in that like List::MoreUtils::any(), it stops looking as soon as it has seen a value that meets your test criteria.