Please rethink your use of quotes. As far as I can see you are forcing Perl to look through each string for possible variable interpolation.
I really gonna wonder if
print '<option> Compliment </option>'; # why omit the closing tag?
# use this for pretty output
print '<option> Compliment </option>' . "\n";
# or even like this
use constant CRLF = "\n";
# ...
print '<option> Compliment </option>' . CRLF ;
# or use CGI::Pretty
would lead to strange results as well as your
print "<option> Compliment";
At least the first one should run faster :-) Do you have any subs declared matching the one or the other "name" in your output strings? Do you, worst I could think of, have a filehandle called OPTION?
Have a nice day
All decision is left to your taste