Here's a benchmark I tried that compares sorting to
hash-walking for hashes of various sizes, and the results
confirm Dominus's expectations. The hash entries are
generated using rand(65000) and
both subs are given the same hash to work with.
(I think the comparison
is pretty fair, let me know if you have ideas for either
of the subs!)
The code:
sub walkit {
my $hashref = shift;
my $min = each %$hashref;
$min > $_ and $min = $_ for keys %$hashref;
$min;
}
sub sortit {
my $hashref = shift;
( sort {$a<=>$b} keys %$hashref )[0];
}
The results:
Size sort walk
10 8329.50/s 5289.68/s (sort wins!)
100 1020.53/s 727.29/s (sort wins!)
1000 94.68/s 80.14/s (sort wins!)
10000 7.15/s 7.31/s (almost a wash...)
100000 0.52/s 0.73/s (walking wins!)