Where is the bottleneck in your program? The parsing code you've posted could probably be optimized, but your problem may well be IO/compression related (and that, too, is just a possibility).

You need to profile your code to find out which subs/blocks are consuming the most time. My preference is Devel::NYTProf, which can produce very detailed HTML reports. From its SYNOPSIS:

  # profile code and write database to ./nytprof.out
  perl -d:NYTProf some_perl.pl

  # convert database into a set of html files, e.g., ./nytprof/index.h
+tml
  # and open a web browser on the nytprof/index.html file
  nytprofhtml --open
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