Speeding up an application - general rules

I have a small Perl application that searches through a series of
directories chosen by the user for files containing a pattern or group
of patterns. The file names and matching patterns are returned to the
user sorted by the file's modification time.The user also has the
choice of how far back in time to search and how many lines of output
he wants to see for each file.

With an expected and current increase of files and file sizes, the
application is bogging down a bit. I didn't design it with performance
in mind and I will be reviewing what I've done, but are there general
rules or specific suggestions you could offer to enhance performance?

Basically: the script uses perl's system command to run a long winded
"find" command which is piped to sed to correct patterns that match
HTML markers. The matching lines are then shoved into an array. The
elements of the array are moved into a hash for the purpose of sorting
the file names. Then file names and matching lines are printed.

Q: Can I speed things by eliminating the sed command and letting Perl
filter and modify the matching patterns? If so, how much of a
performance gain?

Is using Perl's grep to search through every file for the pattern
faster than using the find command? The find command has the advantage
that I can search for files of a certain date rather easily. Again:
could that be done more rapidly by Perl's looking at the file's mod
time?

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated

TX

.

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