An apparatus includes a digital signal processor to perform perturbation-based optical nonlinearity compensation of optical data signals of a communication stream. The digital signal processor includes first digital circuits to calculate multiplicative factors for corrections to the optical data signals from products of values of the optical data signals at a reduced set of times. The reduced set is a down-sampling of the sequence of consecutive symbol times of the communication stream. The digital signal processor also includes second digital circuits to calculate the multiplicative factors for corrections to the optical data signals at the consecutive symbol times by interpolating the multiplicative factors evaluated at the reduced set of times.