If you are returning a hash and you will be using it heavily, you may get better performance if you return it as a hash and avoid the overhead of constantly dereferencing it. So the performance is 6 of one, a half-dozen of the other.

As for the specific example that I directed you to, the return from that code is only part of a list that is used to construct a hash. By returning it as a list, rather than a reference, I am able to just put the entire function straight in the constructor.

The alternative that I suggested should satisfy both of us. In both list and scalar context it does something reasonable. You may consider doing different things in different contexts to be dangerous behaviour. I firmly disagree. Being context sensitive allows code to be both clear and concise. Perl is a member of the short and sweet school of maintainability.

Oh, as for real problems, try a database design where you do a query to get a list of record to work with, and then proceed down the list firing off queries on each record rather than having the original query do everything for you? Or how about having code that scans lists all of the time rather than doing hash look-ups? Or how about having a misconfigured firewall in front of your load balancer?

Those are all problems that gobble up orders of magnitude more performance than trying to make all of your functions return references rather than lists.

In reply to RE (tilly) 4: Load Balancing fun.. by tilly
in thread Load Balancing fun.. by reyjrar

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.