There is no way to answer your question. Sure, if you're working with smaller hashes, maybe your program's performance would improve. Maybe it would degrade, though, depending upon how many buckets the keys would be allocated to (unlikely, but this is just an illustration). That would depend upon the keys. Further, if it takes a longer to delete those keys than the savings you would get from working with a smaller hash, then it's a waste of time. And what about the value of your time? If this program runs once a week for about 30 minutes, is it really worth it?

In any event, figure out what's important to you and if you think that deleting those keys might help, check out the Benchmark module. It comes standard with Perl.

Cheers,
Ovid

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