On really big files your speed should be bounded by how fast you can read from disk. If that is the case, C or something else would only have a lower CPU utilization, not more speed.

Nevertheless the fastest search will be with grep I suspect. You might want to compare your solution to a simple "grep IP1 | grep IP2 | grep year" on the command line. If IP1 isn't too common the following two greps won't be a relevant factor into the total running time. And grep is highly optimised C-code.

In reply to Re: Parsing Large Text Files For Performance by jethro
in thread Parsing Large Text Files For Performance by bigbot

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