> gets need to scan for the newline. =A0Here's my numbers
>
> ruby 1.9.2dev (2010-02-09 trunk 26623) [i686-linux]
> gets: 0.13s user 0.42s system 88% cpu 0.626 total
> read: 0.08s user 0.46s system 93% cpu 0.578 total

Oh ok.
On Linux 1.9.2 it seems fixed (in a virtualbox, 1.8 takes 3s, 1.9 2s)

On windows, however...

1.8.6 takes 688s to read with :gets (appears to have similar speeds
with 1.8.8, and with mswin compiled versions)

ruby 1.9.2dev (2010-02-12 trunk 26649) [i386-mingw32] takes 1361s to
read with :gets

both are about instantaneous with :read, and both can scan " " * (100
* 1000 * 1000) pretty quickly (instantaneous, compared to 688s).

So this might be a window only problem.  If that's a surprise :)

Interestingly, with 1.9.2 if you open the file as 'r' (ascii mode)
then gets is a quick 2s (read is slow).  If you open the file as 'rb',
gets is slow (688s) and read is quick (0.2s).

Suppose I should refile these as separate bugs.

Thanks!
-rp