You're missing some info. Can the matches overlap, for example? In other words, should 'AGG' count like this: 

'A'    => 1,
'G'    => 2,
'AG'   => 1,
'GG'   => 1,
'AGG'  => 1,

[download]
?

If so, maybe something like: 

use warnings; use strict;

open GENE, '<', '\test.txt' or die("Unable to read: $!");
my @rolling = (undef, undef, undef);
my %count;
my $cnt;

until (eof GENE) {
   my $char;
   read(GENE,$char,1);
   next unless $char=~/[AGCT]/; #make sure it's a valid char;

   shift @rolling;
   push @rolling, $char;

   next unless defined $rolling[2];
   $count{$rolling[2]}++;            #one-char count

   next unless defined $rolling[1];
   $count{join('',@rolling[1,2])}++; #two-char count

   next unless defined $rolling[0]; 
   $count{join('',@rolling)}++;      #three-char count
}

[download]

The hash %count will contain one key for each one-, two-, or three-letter combination found. The value associated with a key is the count of occurances. If you need to know about '0' occurances, you should pre-initialize %count like: 

my @chars = qw[A C G T];
for my $aleph (0..$#chars) {
   $count{$aleph}=0;
   for my $beth (0..$#chars) {
      $count{$aleph.$beth}=0;
      for my $gimal (0..$#chars) {
         $count{$aleph.$beth.$gimal}=0;
      }
   }
}

[download]

I created a test file of 6 million random chars in the set [AGTC] for performance testing. Results: 

60 wallclock secs (59.19 usr +  0.03 sys = 59.22 CPU) @  0.02/s (n=1)

[download]

This is on a 2.4GHz single machine, not doing much else. Is that fast enough?

Update: for maintainability, you could use this chunk instead of the all the stuff after push: 

for ( reverse(0..$#rolling) ) {
   next unless defined $_-@rolling;
   $count{join('',@rolling[$_-@rolling,-1])}++;
}

[download]

Then, by adding more undefs to the initial @rolling, you can handle longer strings.

<-radiant.matrix->
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The Code that can be seen is not the true Code
"In any sufficiently large group of people, most are idiots" - Kaa's Law

In reply to Re: Question about speeding a regexp count by radiantmatrix
in thread Question about speeding a regexp count by Commander Salamander

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