I suspect there's not too much merit in your *233/800 factor - those numbers are just raw processor Mhz numbers, many cycles will be wasted waiting for main memory and man, many more if disk IO is required.
You could also use DB_File which is available via PPM from ActiveState and I believe uses the same API
SDBM_File is a core perl module which also uses the same API, but has significant limitations on allowable size of data
See also MLDBM which allows you to store complex data structures in a DBM hash