First, is the problem that it takes too long, or that it uses too much CPU? If it's that it takes too long, you need to profile wall time, not CPU time. If your application does any significant I/O, that's almost certainly the time bottleneck, and you won't see it when profiling CPU time. Until you've done this, forget about method call overhead and inline functions.

Next, stop using fields. The feature you're referring to was called pseudohashes and it was killed a long time ago (5.8 I think) because it caused problems and didn't deliver on the expected improvements. If you want hashes that don't autovivify keys, use Hash::Util::lock_keys(). If you're not on 5.8 yet, it would be a good move to get there.

In reply to Re: Optimizing a large project. by perrin
in thread Optimizing a large project. by dextius

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.