Instead of actually splitting the file into several additional files, you could just determine the positions as you describe, then work on the different parts by seeking to the right position before starting your processing loop. For example, you could determine the start and end position and then fork() off a new process to work on that chunk. Reading from multiple files (or different places in the same file) in parallel might end up being less efficient from an I/O perspective, though, as it could require the drive to seek a lot more. So you'd need to experiment a bit to find the right way to parallelize this.

In reply to Re^4: Looking for ways to speed up the parsing of a file... by sgifford
in thread Looking for ways to speed up the parsing of a file... by fiddler42

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.