I generated 500,000 lines of random CSV with this script

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

# create source numbers if they don't exist
my $many = 500000;
my $source='numbers.csv';
open CSV, '>', $source or die "can't write to $source: $!\n";
for (1..$many) {
    my @numbers;
    push @numbers, (int rand 1000) for (1..5);
    print CSV join ",",@numbers;
    print CSV $/;
}
[download]

Then I tried a few one liners to sum the columns, I ran each twice and post the second timing to allow for cache

nph>time cat numbers.csv | perl -nle'@d=split /,/;$a[$_]+=$d[$_] for (
+0..4);END{print join "\t", @a}'
249959157       249671314       249649377       250057435       249420
+634

real    0m17.10s
user    0m15.46s
sys     0m0.08s

nph>time perl -nle'my @d=split /,/;$a[$_]+=$d[$_] for (0..4);END{print
+ join "\t", @a}' numbers.csv
249959157       249671314       249649377       250057435       249420
+634

real    0m13.71s
user    0m12.77s
sys     0m0.04s

nph>time perl -nle'my($a,$b,$c,$d,$e)=split /,/;$ta+=$a, $tb+=$b, $tc+
+=$c, $td+=$d, $te+=$e;END{print join "\t", $ta,$tb,$tc,$td,$te}' numb
+ers.csv
249959157       249671314       249649377       250057435       249420
+634

real    0m6.45s
user    0m5.91s
sys     0m0.07s
[download]

The last one was consistently faster after several attempts with it and the second.

Cheers,
R.