Your problem isn't so much the file size, your problem is that you want to make an array element for every single character. This is Perl, not C, so this is going to be costly - you'll get the overhead of a "Perl value" for each character.

Do you really need that? Can't you use substr? Do you have to have all the characters of the file at the same time? Isn't the encryption/decryption algorithm made such that it encrypts/decrypts blocks of some decent size?

Abigail

In reply to Re: Eating RAM problem by Abigail-II
in thread Eating RAM problem by TheFifthDeuce

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