That'll depend to a large extent on your filesystem, and whether your bottleneck is in the IO of reading the files or in the parsing once lines are in memory. A bunch of threads all trying to read different files at the same time could possibly slow things down, if the disks have to keep jumping around from file to file to serve the different threads in turn. In general, it's probably faster to ask a disk for file1 and then file2 than to ask for both simultaneously. Filesystems have gotten pretty smart about such things, but ultimately the hardware can only do one thing at a time. If you have multiple disks, perhaps in RAID or a mirroring situation, then it may be possible to read more than one file at a time, and you could gain something. And if your parsing is complicated enough that you can parse a chunk from file1 while a chunk from file2 is being found and read, you could gain a lot.

Of course, the only way to find out for sure will be to try it.

Aaron B.
Available for small or large Perl jobs; see my home node.

In reply to Re^8: Sharing Hash Question by aaron_baugher
in thread Sharing Hash Question by jmmach80

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.