Thanks for your attention. I've returned with details not available at home.

First I need to claim a bit of brain fade. The line "@complete = <INPUT>;" in the second snippet should have read "push @complete, <INPUT>;"--lostjimmy was exactly right with his comment.

Now back to the rat killing. When I run a pair of files (each about 89Mb) through these snippets, the first method runs about 105 seconds, the second only about four. If these files are concatenated externally to the script (i.e. into a single 180 Mb file) then the first runs in roughly 30 seconds while the second method still takes around four.

This is running on a 2.4 GHz Windows machine with 4Gb of RAM and the behavior still puzzles me.

As always, many thanks for your comments and thoughts.


In reply to Re: slow file slurping by hill
in thread slow file slurping by hill

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.