Thanks for the prompt reactions to this question. They helped me decide where to place my efforts in optimizing the program.
The difference in calling read_chars() and read_all() I missed when I studied the code, so that was a revealing remark.
Hans van der Meer
wrote:
In
one of my programs I am reading files in the order of 1 or more GigaBytes. Measuring the program behaviour I came to the conclusion that a not insignificant fraction of the processing time goes into reading the file. If possible I would like to reduce this
(or have to live with it -- also an option).