Others have suggested going parallel. I'll address the actual question of optimization.

You are running into the classic challenges of taking advantage of a library. If I run the code

time perl -E'say "This is my $_ test message!" for 1 .. 1000000' > jun
+k.txt
[download]

on my command line, it takes time about half a second. Why does it take orders of magnitude more time for your subroutine call to syslog than just a simple disk print? If we review the module source code (here), you can see all sorts of computation that is replicated unnecessarily a million times. I'd highly recommend you use a profiler (I use Devel::NYTProf) to see where time is actually being spent. I would expect that if you copied the syslog subroutine out of the module, it would run just fine with a small amount of rehab, such as changing

local $facility = $facility;    # may need to change temporarily.
[download]

to

local $facility = $Sys::Syslog::facility;    # may need to change temp
+orarily.
[download]

Once it's running, then you'll have the capability to pull as much out of that big loop as possible, guided by the profiler. What you get with a library is ease of use, but you get limited because libraries are written for the general case. And that's why open source is great.

Alternatively, you can decide your time is more valuable than the computer's, and just leave it running overnight/all week/until the heat death of the universe.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.