You should ask the person who prepares your input file if he can direct you to either a specification of the file format or to the documentation of the program that created it. If this fails, I would write a perl program to list all the tags. The only way I know to get the values, is use an editor to examine the tags in context and make your best guess. (It usually will be obvious.)

It is nearly impossible to guess what will or will not make a Perl program faster. The usual advice is to profile your program. Only work on those parts which are using the most time. Use benchmark to measure possible improvement. In your case, I/O is probably taking much longer than processing. Slurping the entire file into memory is probably not an option. Reading the file in large blocks may help, but it is not easy to get right. I recommend against any optimization unless it is absolutely necessary.