Today, I went a bit mental and loaded an entire set of cgi's into one program. (About 5 meg). Forget all that loading later and just put every last scrap of code into the cgi (about 40cgis went into 1 program). I then tweaked it with a command dispatch table to handle all the direct calls that would have previously been to a stand alone cgi.

Here is the part that is interesting - I saw no variation in system load. Memory did take a sizable hit and jumped from about 8gig to 12gig usage), but the server still had plenty of free mem and was not caching at all.

The system seems faster! Clearly, all the disk I/O to load cgi's was an issue with the individual cgis - even on an ssd drive server. The larger cgi is mostly staying cached in memory (*nix system).

Anyone had any experience with large scripts? Where is the breaking point for Perl? Is it all "resource" or system based? Does perl run into issues where optimization/speed/lookups/etc become an issue?