Have you tried parsing the file without loading it all into memory?

open (IN, "/home/reports/ftp/WSB/test.txt");

....

while ( <IN> ) {
  my $line = $_;
  ....
}
[download]

I realize you won't get the total counts before parsing, but you could see if the load into memory had something to do with it.

Edit by castaway: Closed small tag in signature