why is perl -e 'unlink(glob("*"))' so much faster than rm ?

i had a situation that required that i remove several thousand zero
byte files, and i tried this first:

# find . -type f -exec rm -f {} \;

this was taking ages, so on a hunch I decided to try this to see it I
got any better results:

# perl -e 'unlink(glob("*"))'

surprisingly the perl unlink took about a quarter of a second to remove
1000 files versus 30 seconds with find / rm

any idea why?

.