Is it possible to use threads to speed up file reading?

Question

I want to read a file as fast as possible (40k lines) [Edit : the rest is obsolete].

Edit: Andres Jaan Tack suggested a solution based on one thread per file, and I

Answer 1

This is a problem of granularity. You've got a small file, and very little processing to do. One thread can probably gobble the entire file in one time slice and process it in the next. Two threads would be worse than one. You need a much larger task before considering parallelism as a performance solution.