Of course I still use Perl

Here are some of the techniques I use to minimize startup overhead. Due to the nature of our application (command-line tools), we would like quick responses everytime a script is called from the shell.

1) Avoid Moose. Mouse used to be a bit too heavy for my taste too, so we always use Moo, but nowadays I guess Mouse is okay, especially since Mouse provides much more feature. But in general I still avoid OO-style or use bare Perl5 OO for simpler apps.

2) Avoid heavy modules and use lighter variants. I usually run this script when trying out modules, and take its result into consideration. I used to choose CGI::Lite over CGI for this reason, though nowadays I very seldom have to resort to CGI directly (thanks to PSGI/Plack).

3) Delay loading of modules as much as possible. Some modules are only needed by a subroutine in a using-module, so instead of:

use Foo;
use Bar;

I usually write:


# Foo is used by lorem only
sub lorem {
require Foo;
my ($arg1, $arg2) = @_;
...
Foo::foo();
}

# Bar is used by ipsum only
sub ipsum {
require Bar;
...
}


Sometimes a module is used by two or three subroutines, and I pepper each with the require statements. I think this is still okay.

4) Use AutoLoader, or a similar home-brewed technique based on AUTOLOAD mechanism.

5) Split larger modules into smaller ones. Of course, splitting is mainly decided based on design, but sometimes this is done for reducing startup overhead too.

6) Use persistent Perl environment, e.g. PPerl or SpeedyCGI. Actually I have had little success so far with this approach, because of some pitfalls and restrictions you need to be aware of. Years ago I tried to use PPerl with AWStats (which is a monolithic giant Perl script with at least 1-2s of compilation overhead) and it gave me strange results. I'm also contemplating using PPerl or SpeedyCGI when writing a Perl-based suexec replacement for Apache (for greater flexibility of CGI scripts execution, e.g. adding extra checks and making it work with dynamic virtual hosts) but so far no luck yet due to lacking setuid support.

Most of these tools are also no longer maintained. For example, Debian has maintained the speedy-cgi-perl package to compile with Perl 5.10 but the upstream version on CPAN no longer compiles with more current Perl versions.

What techniques do you use?