Hi John - One good question to ask is why are you making every entry into an acs_object? I'm writing a similar application which also uses perl/dbi to input very large amounts of data into a couple of tables and so far I have no big performance issues. I would suggest that perhaps you may need to rethink your data model. From what you relay here, I think that's where you'll get your best performance gains. There are some good threads on the subject of the abuse of acs_objects. Just do a search via google if you have a problem bringing it up via the search engine. Unfortunately, I don't have the links handy...
