First off: I’d simply switch to a less bozotic provider as soon as possible.

That said, for the principle of it,

my $rec;

sysopen my $fh, "test.txt", O_RDWR | O_CREAT or die "$!";
sysread $fh, $rec, -s $fh;

my $offs = 0;
while( $offs < length $rec ) {
    my $next_eol_offs = index $rec, "\n", $offs;
    $next_eol_offs = length( $rec ) - 1 if $next_eol_offs == -1;

    my $str = substr $rec, $offs, $next_eol_offs - $offs + 1;

    # work on $str; note that it includes the newline

    substr( $rec, $offs, $next_eol_offs - $offs + 1 ) = $str;

    $offs += length $str;
}

seek $fh, 0, 0;
syswrite $fh, $rec;

close $fh or die "$!";

[download]

Note that there are error checks in here that your own code did not include.

This will execute as few “I/O processes” as possible and consume as little memory as possible (well, it could consume a tiny bit less if you use substr as an lvalue instead of making a copy, but that is fraught with bugs), but at the cost of stupidly high CPU consumption and convoluted code. Doing it in a more natural way would consume minimal CPU and memory resources and do no more I/O than this way does, only it would stretch the I/O over more “I/O processes.”

I can’t imagine why any hoster would think forcing their customers to burn a ton of CPU is a good idea, unless either their tech dep’t is clueless (their use of the term “I/O process” makes me inclined to assume this) or their storage subsystem is seriously under-budgeted, so they’re forcing their customers to rewrite their code in harder to maintain fashion to evade the I/O bottleneck by trading CPU time for I/O. (But even that is a far-fetched explanation, and I’m not sure if doing the same amount of I/O in fewer syscalls would be any help. I vote “clueless.”)

Roughly.

Whatever the case, I’d run away from them instead of making my code a damn sight unreadable.

Update: fixed code per BrowserUk’s reply below.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re: Suggestions for optimizing this code... by Aristotle
in thread Suggestions for optimizing this code... by NeilF

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