time to read one of my data files

no extra parameters to read.table

   user  system elapsed
 618.64    0.14  630.06

colClasses parameter added to read.table

   user  system elapsed
 832.57    0.27  868.34

took even longer! now specifying nrow length

   user  system elapsed
 622.62    0.16  633.14

verdict: this textConnection is simply slowing everything down