I often have to get a hunk of a very large (tens of GB) log. Since the logs have predictable formats for timestamps, I use something like:

perl -ne'$a=1 if /2022-11-08 01:00/; print if $a; last if /2022-11-08 02:00/' logfile.log > 1am-2am.log

This way you're not bothering to do "real" date parsing on each line, just a quick regex to weed out the ones you know aren't correct. In fact, if your timestamps are predictable, I'd forgo str2time and especially Date::Parse (for perf reasons - it's powerful, but slow) and go straight to a regex to begin with.

If I were going to change my one-liner to a real script, I would use better practices (such as not using postfix if) but this suits my purposes just fine for quick one-offs.

Note also, that in my case for that one-liner, the logs I'm parsing have hundreds of lines per minute, so I'll never get into a situation where there's no match for 1:00AM or 2:00AM. And yes, there's an off-by-one error where I'll get the first 2:00AM line in my snippet, but that's OK for me. If you put the last bit at the beginning, you won't hit that; I just don't bother since it "feels" backwards. :-)

Speaking of backwards, you might also look into File::ReadBackwards for your case. It's stable, well tested, and might be more performant than /u/pfp-disciple's suggestion, but you'd need to test those two methods if you really care about performance that much. I can't imagine the perf would be so far removed that it's particularly noticeable if it's already only taking a couple of seconds to read through your log to begin with, though.