I've been messing around with the Benchmark module and experimenting what the quickest way is to approach file-reading. I'm currently benchmarking the following code working on a 2.5 MB wordlist:

use Benchmark qw/countit cmpthese/;

sub run($) { countit(1, @_) }

cmpthese {
    read_proc => run q{
    open(WORDS,"words.txt") or die("Wordlist unavaliable.\n");
    my @words = <WORDS>;
        close(WORDS);
    
        foreach $word (@words){
        chomp $word;
        if ($word =~ m/[aeiouyAEIOUY]{4,}/){
        push(@hitwords,$word);
        $hitcounter++; 
        }
        $counter++;
    }
    },
    for_proc => run q{
    open(WORDS,"words.txt") or die("Wordlist unavaliable.\n");
    
        foreach $word (<WORDS>){
        chomp $word;
        if ($word =~ m/[aeiouyAEIOUY]{4,}/){
        push(@hitwords,$word);
        $hitcounter++; 
        }
        $counter++;
    }
        close(WORDS);

    },
    while_proc => run q{
    open(WORDS,"words.txt") or die("Wordlist unavaliable.\n");

        while($word = <WORDS>){
        chomp $word;
        if ($word =~ m/[aeiouyAEIOUY]{4,}/){
        push(@hitwords,$word);
        $hitcounter++; 
        }
        $counter++;
    }
        close(WORDS);
    }

};
[download]

I would expect while_proc to be the fastest by far and the entire chunck of code should take only a few minutes to run. However, when I run it, it takes hours and then gives me this as a result:

           s/iter   for_proc  read_proc while_proc
for_proc     5983         --        -6%      -100%
read_proc    5645         6%         --      -100%
while_proc   2.42    246713%    232775%         --
[download]

Now I know that can't be right. Each block of code runs fine by itself, and while_proc IS the fastest version of the code. But the Benchmark results don't verify that at all. What am I doing wrong? I know I need to run more iterations for a reliable benchmark, but I can't really do that if one takes half the day.

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