Suggestions as to what tests i can run are welcome.

The profiling you've done doesn't get into enough detail in the critical areas.

The first thing I would try, is isolating whether the extra time is spent reading from the file or shuffling memory. To that end, I'd see what happens to the timings if I just read the data but didn't store it:

#! perl -slw
#use 5.010;
use strict;
use Time::HiRes qw[ time ];;

sub x{
    open my $fh, '<', shift or die $!;
#    my @AoA;
    my $dummy = [ split ',' ] while <$fh>;
    close $fh;
    return $.;
}

for ( 1 .. 5 ) {
    my $start = time;
    printf "Records: %d in %.3f seconds\n",
        x( sprintf 'junk%d.dat', 1+ ($_ & 1) ),
        time() - $start;
}
[download]

Alright, broke the script up a bit and ran 3 different benchmarks in ActivePerl, Cygwin and Strawberry Perl. Here's the results: http://drop.io/perl_performance/asset/ap-vs-cw-vs-sb-rar

It's really weird. If it pushes the data into the AoA, it takes a long time on the splitting. However if it doesn't push, then the splits go fast.

Hm. I would have taken a look, but when I try to unrar your archive, there are mutliple copies of files all with the same name and no path information, so each overwrites the last.

(I have to say that all those (2.25 MB of) htmls, pngs & csss seem like overkill as a way of presenting the same information that could be conveyed in three short text files. And with the latter, I could manipulate the numbers programmically rather than having to constantly chase my tail around several dozen html pages. )

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

"Too many [] have been sedated by an oppressive environment of political correctness and risk aversion."

(Feel free to ignore since I just started reading this thread.) The link requires too much work (possiblly to allow drop.io domain to run JavaScript, followed by taking a quiz) to see the results.