Wanted to thank everyone for responding, first of all. I've made a few changes to the test code based on the suggestions and it looks like the problems have *mostly* cleared. What I'm seeing now is a bottleneck more than anything. One Zip is processed (each Zip contains one server log file), the script slows to a crawl for about 1-3 minutes when the one Zip is done and the next begins, and then it continues whizzing through the text file (I'm roughly gauging the speed by having a line counter updating). I'm still a little puzzled by the bottleneck. My best guess is some sort of buffer size issue. Thanks again!

use Archive::Zip;
use Archive::Zip::MemberRead;

...a few other variables set up here...
@files = qw(ex041201.zip ex041202.zip ex041203.zip ex041204.zip);

foreach $file (@files) 
{   
    open(LOG, ">>$log_terms") || die "Cannot open $log_terms. $!";
    $zip = new Archive::Zip("$source/$file");
    $text = new Archive::Zip::MemberRead($zip, "WebTrends.log"); 
    while (defined($line = $text->getline()))
    {
        @splitline = split / /, $line;
        ...do some processing...
        undef(@splitline);                      
      }
    }
    undef($text);
    undef($zip);
    close(LOG);    
  }
  print "\a";
}
[download]