[R] Reading large files quickly

[Rob Steele]

Thanks guys, good suggestions.  To clarify, I'm running on a fast
multi-core server with 16 GB RAM under 64 bit CentOS 5 and R 2.8.1.
Paging shouldn't be an issue since I'm reading in chunks and not trying
to store the whole file in memory at once.  Thanks again.

Rob Steele wrote:
> I'm finding that readLines() and read.fwf() take nearly two hours to
> work through a 3.5 GB file, even when reading in large (100 MB) chunks.
>  The unix command wc by contrast processes the same file in three
> minutes.  Is there a faster way to read files in R?
> 
> Thanks!
>