New to the list; would this be an okay question?

Hi all,

   I am new to the list and I didn't want to seem rude at all so I
wanted to ask if this was okay first.

   I have a program I have written in perl which uses a postgresSQL
database as the backend. The program works but the performance is really
bad. I have been reading as much as I can on optimizing performance but
still it isn't very reasonable. At one point I had my program able to
process 175,000 records in 16min 10sec on a Pentium3 650MHz, 448MB RAM
test machine. Since then I got a Pentium3 1GHz, 512MB system and I have
tried a lot of things to get the performance up but now it is
substantially slower and I can't seem to figure out what I am doing wrong.

   Would it be appropriate to ask for help on my program on this list?
Full disclosure: The program won't be initially GPL'ed because it is for
my company but it will be released for free to home users and the source
code will be made available (similar to other split-license programs)
though once my company makes it's money back I think they will fully GPL
it (I am on my boss's case about it :p ).

   Thanks all!

Madison Kelly