As others have pointed out, you should try benchmarking some test code if execution speed or efficiency are your concerns. Some benchmarking examples can be found through Super Search. I posted a Benchmarking Quiz not long ago that has some examples.

However, you should also take into consideration your available resources and their relative strengths and weaknesses (e.g., slow disk, i/o, RAM available, CPU utilization, etc.). If you have scads of RAM and CPU cycles, slurp and burp!

Most of my "work" perl code is on a Sparc Enterprise 450 with 1GB of RAM that is primarily an E-mail server, so I routinely slurp text files 5MB+ with no noticeable impact on performance or resources. It's relative to your environment.

--Jim