Can confirm, buffer *definitely* wins on my laptop, and reducing the speed of the operation by such a margin that I hardly think we need to worry any further.  It does have the slightly unfortunate side effect of needing a hard-coded buffer size.

I made an edit to `dumbcount` called `dumbcount_v2` which gets a factor of a little less than 2 speedup over the dumbtest on my machine, bringing it within a factor of ~two of the buffered results:
```
***FINAL RESULTS***
Dumb test: 0.00401329994202 without comments
Dumb test: 0.000358414649963 with comments
Dumb test v2: 0.00237720012665 without comments
Dumb test v2: 0.000222897529602 with comments
Buffer test: 0.00110528469086 without comments
Buffer test: 0.000152611732483 with comments
Numpy test: 0.154928016663 without comments
Numpy test: 0.00983901023865 with comments
```
This doesn't need a buffer.  However, I'm concerned that the first entry on the table above takes so much longer in each case: I'm guessing there must be some setup cost at work here, penalizing the `NumPy` without comments result in particular.  But either way, I think we have some good options. Thanks Melanie!