Optimising perl

[alex@owal.co.uk]

Can anyone suggest some reading for optimising perl? (This is inherited
code so dont blame me for lazy algorythms used :-)

I am basically munging large amounts of data from files or sybase
databases and either creating large files or filling in other sybase
databases

We are hitting memory limits and of course always want things to run faster.

I have had a suggestion to use Memoize but this only seems to be useful on
stateless functions ie things which will return the same value every time
the function is called with the same parameters. Right? This comes as
standard for perl 5.8 so someone must find this useful.

We are building huge hashes in memory which we might tie to disk, or (my
preference) tie to a memcached database. This gets us around the 4Gb
memory limit in the perl binary we are using by spreading the memory
across two processes.


Cheers

Alex