Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have been testing perl 5.14 RC2 version in one of our dev box during last week, and the performance improvements are just monstrous! Got a 20-30% faster app straight out of the box, and some hefty memory savings. It's really noticeable on smaller scripts. Can't wait to put 5.14 in production!
20% to 30% has typically been the difference between threaded and non-threaded perl interpreters. Have you checked if both your old and the new perl have the same threading settings? I expected some performance improvements from the upgrade, but I found 20% to be pretty surprising -- still I won't complain :-)
The noted speed improvement is for a hefty Catalyst + DBIC + Moose app. Also seen similar performance improvements in a smaller Dancer app we have. Maybe it's related to the BUFSIZ changes.