why are you now delimiting (or trying to split) records on a $<TAB><TAB><NEWLINE> not even sure that that's what's it's trying to split on, as you've got quotes in the wrong places there "...$/ = qq{"\$"\t""\t""\n};..." To cut to the chase: the program was trying to slurp the whole file, as it couldn't find the record delimiter, and was trying real hard to do so. Here's a simple solution...please provide a proper sequence of characters for the regex to look for to find the end of each record, if it's not the original "$" (dollar sign on a line by itself) 
while($line=<>) {
  chomp $line;
  if($line =~ /^\$$/) {    #look for start of line, followed by a lite
+ral dollar sign, followed by the end of the line (not newline charact
+er, but $ has to be at the end of $line)
    close OUTFILE;
    undef $data;
    next;
  }
  if(!$data) {
    open(OUTFILE,">$line") or die;
  } else {
    $data = 1;
    print OUTFILE "$line\n";
  }
}

[download]
this is nice and simple (procedural style coding) that you will find easier to understand. run the script "perl script.pl <your_data_file"

In reply to Re: Optimizing a script by aquarium
in thread Optimizing a script by Micz

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