I haven't done / don't recall seeing any benchmarks comparing PerlIO::gzip against the pipeline open, and I wouldn't hazard a guess that one of them is likely to be significantly faster than the other.

If it's just a one-shot pass over 5.3 GB, don't sweat it and use whichever one strikes you as more fun. But if this will be an ongoing, oft-repeated process working on lots of data, it might be worth your while to set up a simple test to see if there might be a speed difference.

In that case, I'd advise against test scripts that only do the i/o. Contrast two versions of the script such that both do everything that needs to be done, and they differ only in the i/o method. If one is faster than the other, you'll get a clear idea of how important the difference is in the context of evertyhing else the script does.

UPDATE: (2010-10-18) It seems that PerlIO::gzip should be viewed as superseded by PerlIO::via:gzip. (see PerlIO::gzip or PerlIO::via::gzip).

In reply to Re^3: reading compressed data by graff
in thread reading compressed data by kettle

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