When perl is not quite fast enough

When perl is not quite fast enough

By Nicholas Clark from London.pm
Date: Wednesday, 23 July 2003 09:15
Duration: 180 minutes
Language:

"When perl is not quite fast enough" - a tutorial on optimising perl.
(as seen at The German Perl Workshop and The Scandinavian Perl Workshop)

This is a tutorial on how make Perl scripts go faster, without having to use
C or XS. In it you will learn ways I've found to make your troublesome slow
scripts go faster, and how you can try to avoid some problems in the first
place.

You may think that optimising is the only way to makes scripts go faster,
but the tutorial starts with ways to cheat, as that's a much better
solution, because it usually takes much less effort, and gives more time for
you to go and do something more fun than writing boring Perl. (Such as
writing Acme:: modules)

The tutorial will demonstrate the techniques using specific real code as
examples, showing code before and after, which I'll run interactively to
give a feel for what sort of thing can be achieved.

The tutorial is evolved from the talk I gave in Munich, with a more logical
order, code examples I didn't have time to show there, and time to explain
what's going on in them at a relaxed pace. The programs will be going
faster, not me.