title: Python performance on reading files with extremely long lines
body: <p>I've got a file with around 6MB of data. All of the data are written in a single line. Why is the following command taking more than 15 minutes to finish? Is it normal?</p>
  
  <pre><code>infile = open('file.txt')
  outfile = open('out.txt', 'w')
  for line in infile.readlines():
      outfile.write(line);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>Details:</strong></p>
  
  <p>I'm using Python 2.7.</p>
  
  <p>Output from <strong>wc</strong>:  </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>newline count: 2</li>
  <li>word count: 3475246 </li>
  <li>byte count: 6951140 </li>
  </ul>
  
  <p><strong>Evaluation 1:</strong></p>
  
  <p><em>Reference</em> code using in file (suggestted by Ahsanul Haque and Daewon Lee):</p>
  
  <pre><code>for line in infile:
      output.write(line):
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><em>Time: 959.487 secs.</em></p>