read.table performance

** Disclaimer: I'm looking for general suggestions **
I'm sorry, but can't send out the file I'm using, so there is no
reproducible example.

I'm using read.table and it's taking over 30 seconds to read a tiny file.
The strange thing is that it takes roughly the same amount of time if the
file is 100 times larger.

After re-reviewing the data Import / Export manual I think the best
approach would be to use Python, or perhaps the readLines function, but I
was hoping to understand why the simple read.table approach wasn't working
as expected.

Some relevant facts:

? 1. There are about 3700 columns. ?Maybe this is the problem? ?Still the
? file size is not very large.
? 2. The file encoding is ANSI, but I'm not specifying that in the
? function. ?Setting fileEncoding="ANSI" produces an "unsupported conversion"
? error
? 3. readLines imports the lines quickly
? 4. scan imports the file quickly also

Obviously, scan and readLines would require more coding to identify
columns, etc.

my code:
system.time(dat <- read.table('C:/test.txt', nrows=-1, sep='\t',
header=TRUE))

It's taking 33.4 seconds and the file size is only 315 kb!