marioroy has found that the bigbuffer method (found in http://ideone.com/LzaQI0) runs in 7.8 seconds on his machine, vs the 10.71 seconds you get for grep+wc. What's not known is the relative speed of the two machines. Unfortunately, my machines are in storage while I'm moving, and I'm stuck on this tiny tablet, so I can't run any benchmarks myself. So I ask again, please, can you adopt and run the above code on your machine so we can get accurate results for both the above bigbuffer technique and grep+wc?