I don't know anything about your exact requirements and what your scripts do. But i have a feeling you are doing a lot of data munching. I assume you tried putting your data in a database like PostgreSQL and implementing the time critical parts in SQL?

Example: For a year now i had some performance problems on my DNS server written in Perl. It had to do with white/blacklisting of domains. Basically, it had to do about a million string matches for every request, plus a few thousand regexp matches. I moved the whole matching algorithm into PostgreSQL. It isn't all that optimized yet, but it runs in a fraction of the time:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION pagecamel.nameserver_isforcenx(search_domai
+n_name text)
 RETURNS boolean
 LANGUAGE plpgsql
AS $function$ 
DECLARE
    tempvar boolean := false;
BEGIN

    -- Check whitelist (non-regex)
    SELECT INTO tempvar EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM pagecamel.nameserver_forc
+enxdomain_whitelist
                  WHERE is_regex = false AND search_domain_name = doma
+in_match);

    IF tempvar = true THEN
        -- whitelisted
        RETURN FALSE;
    END IF; 

    -- Check whitelist (regex)
    SELECT INTO tempvar EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM pagecamel.nameserver_forc
+enxdomain_whitelist
                  WHERE is_regex = true AND search_domain_name ~* doma
+in_match);

    IF tempvar = true THEN
        -- whitelisted 
        RETURN FALSE;
    END IF;

    -- Check blacklist (non-regex)
    SELECT INTO tempvar EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM pagecamel.nameserver_forc
+enxdomain
                  WHERE is_regex = false AND search_domain_name = doma
+in_match);

    IF tempvar = true THEN
        -- blacklisted
        RETURN TRUE;
    END IF;

    -- Check blacklist (regex)
    SELECT INTO tempvar EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM pagecamel.nameserver_forc
+enxdomain
                  WHERE is_regex = true AND search_domain_name ~* doma
+in_match);

    IF tempvar = true THEN
        -- blacklisted
        RETURN TRUE;
    END IF;

        -- Neither, so NOT blacklisted
    RETURN false;
END;
$function$;
[download]

Perl is quite good in general. But when it comes to handling large amounts of data, no "normal" scripting language comes even close to a modern SQL database engine like PostgreSQL. People on those projects spent the last few decades optimizing every last tenth of a percent of performance.

Yeah, there is probably a way to optimize that function using the WITH() clause and/or having some special type of INDEX on the table that's somehow optimized to handle regular expressions or something.