In addition to the numerous admonitions you've already gotten for not posting any code in the first place, let me add this: you don't know that Textpad is reading the entire 270k-row file in that 1 second of start-up time. There's no reason for it to read more data than it can display on the initial page prior to setting up the basic display. It can then read the rest of the file in the background, or on an as-needed basis. Plus, as others have pointed out, Textpad is a binary, and a Perl script has to go through a compilation phase first.

--rjray