From: Paul Nulty <paul.nulty@...>
Date: 2007-03-12T01:30:08+09:00
Subject: Opening a large file many times / optimisation

hello,

I have a method that basically searches through a largish (5mb) text
file for a word. I need to call this method about 1400 times, and i
care about speed.

If i open the file at the start of the script and then pass the file
object as a parameter to my method each time its called, the code runs
quite a bit faster than if i open the file inside the method each
time; but this seems ugly to me.

Is there a standard way to do this in ruby? How much overhead is
involved in opening a large text file?

thanks.