Reading large files quickly

I'm finding that readLines() and read.fwf() take nearly two hours to
work through a 3.5 GB file, even when reading in large (100 MB) chunks.
 The unix command wc by contrast processes the same file in three
minutes.  Is there a faster way to read files in R?

I use statist to convert the fixed width data file into a csv file
because read.table() is considerably faster than read.fwf(). For example:

system("statist --na-string NA --xcols collist big.txt big.csv")
bigdf <- read.table(file = "big.csv", header=T, as.is=T)

The file collist is a text file whose lines contain the following
information:

variable begin end

where "variable" is the column name, and "begin" and "end" are integer
numbers indicating where in big.txt the columns begin and end.

Statist can be downloaded from: http://statist.wald.intevation.org/

Jakson Aquino
Social Sciences Department
Federal University of Cear?, Brazil