It seems daft to recompile the program every time it is run so does Perl keep a cache of compiled programs and check the file date (or whatever) to compile the script only when it has been updated?
Kaled.
That said, there are some things you can do to fix it. For example, mod_perl handlers keep the perl interpreter and program resident in memory so that it's already parsed and ready to run. Other modules like template toolkit can cache the compiled templates to disk/database to speed that part up, too.
The big overhead is the initial fork of the interpreter. The Perl interpreter is fairly efficient at parsing code, I believe it interprets the script into an intermediate P-code as it runs so that it only chews on what it needs to, and if it needs it again, it's already in p-code format.
Sean
