in reply to Reduce CPU utilization time in reading file using perl
If your file are sorted in accordance with the comparison key, then you can iterate through the two files in parallel. This can be very very fast. Just a couple of hours ago, I compared two 100-MB files this way, it took less than 3 seconds to run.
$time perl compare_files.pl real 0m2.378s user 0m1.384s sys 0m0.069s
Even if they are not sorted, this might still be the solution: first to sort both files and then read them in parallel. The only difficulty is to get the parallel reading really correct.
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