If reading the file WITHOUT doing significant processing takes already 10 minutes, this must be a tremendously huge file, and maybe you should think your algorithm all over. However, from your code it is not clear what you are wanting to do. You are populating @a and @b, but never use them anywhere.

There is one more thing which puzzles me: Usually, input/output time dominates processing time, unless you do a lot of processing for your input records. You keep your arrays small (@a and @b never grow larger than 6 elements), so the operation on the arrays doesn't impact the run-time significantly. The regexp also is simple enough that I don't think that the processing time of this regexp could be 15 times the reading-time of a record. I would conclude, that the processing time is not lost by your coding, but to be sure, you could insert timer calls in your loop.

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