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$ curl -O http://www.textfiles.com/etext/FICTION/lesms10.txt

...
# Sorry, I didn't want to go through the trouble clearing OS cache.

$ cat lesms10_big.txt >/dev/null

$ time wc lesms10_big.txt
 14152200 113528600 652751200 lesms10_big.txt
...
real 0m2.140s
user 0m2.085s
sys  0m0.055s

$ time ./wc.pl lesms10_big.txt
 14152200 113528600 652751200 lesms10_big.txt
...
real 0m0.740s  (2.89x)
user 0m3.784s
sys  0m1.166s

$ time wc -l lesms10_big.txt
 14152200 lesms10_big.txt
...
real 0m0.208s
user 0m0.678s
sys  0m0.835s

$ time wc -w lesms10_big.txt
 113528600 lesms10_big.txt
...
real 0m0.535s
user 0m3.574s
sys  0m0.599s

$ time wc -c lesms10_big.txt
 652751200 lesms10_big.txt
...
real 0m0.054s
user 0m0.042s
sys  0m0.010s

Linux: sudo echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
macOS: sudo purge
...
user 0m3.598s
sys  0m0.736s