Re^3: Speed up hash initialization loop

[Anonymous Monk]

How large will @$vars be? If larger than a hundred elements or so, you will benefit from a Schwartzian transform:

my @sorted_vars = 
  map { $_->[1] }
  sort { $a->[0] cmp $b->[0] }
  map { [ lc $_, $_ ] } @{$vars};

I'm afraid I'm as out of ideas as the other posters here -- your only recourse is to use a profiler and find the bottlenecks that way.