I installed Perl 5.8.1 on my machine, and now I can provide some simple benchmarks. These show Perl 5.6.1, compiled by me, Perl 5.8.0, compiled by Red Hat with threading turned on, and Perl 5.8.1, compiled by me. In my compiles, I took defaults for everything except the install location.
The test writes and then reads a large set of data using both Cache::FileBackend (from Cache::Cache) and DBD::mysql (to a local database using MyISAM tables). It's an excerpt from a larger set of benchmarks I've been working on. Perl 5.6.1: Cache::FileBackend 8.51/s DBD::mysql 53.0/s Perl 5.8.0 (RH): Cache::FileBackend 5.91/s DBD::mysql 39.6/s Perl 5.8.1: Cache::FileBackend 7.41/s DBD::mysql 59.8/s It looks like 5.6.1 and 5.8.1 are neck and neck, while Red Hat's 5.8.0 Perl is way behind, probably due to being compiled with thread support. So, I apologize for casting aspersions on 5.8.1, which is obviously a high-performing release, but I recommend that people who are concerned about performance not use the Perl that comes with Red Hat 9. - Perrin -- Reporting bugs: http://perl.apache.org/bugs/ Mail list info: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/modperl.html
