Why is BufferedReader read() much slower than readLine()?

Question

I need to read a file one character at a time and I\'m using the read() method from BufferedReader. *

I found that read() is a

Answer 1

So this is the practical answer to my own question: Don't use BufferedReader.read() use FileChannel instead. (Obviously I'm not answering the WHY I put in the title). Here's the quick and dirty benchmark, hopefully others will find it useful:

@Test
public void testFileChannel() throws IOException{

    FileChannel fileChannel = FileChannel.open(Paths.get("chr1.fa"));
    long n= 0;
    int noOfBytesRead = 0;

    long t0= System.nanoTime();

    while(noOfBytesRead != -1){
        ByteBuffer buffer = ByteBuffer.allocate(10000);
        noOfBytesRead = fileChannel.read(buffer);
        buffer.flip();
        while ( buffer.hasRemaining() ) {
            char x= (char)buffer.get();
            n++;
        }
    }
    long t1= System.nanoTime();
    System.err.println((float)(t1-t0) / 1e6); // ~ 250 ms
    System.err.println("nchars: " + n); // 254235640 chars read
}

With ~250 ms to read the whole file char by char, this strategy is considerably faster than BufferedReader.readLine() (~700 ms), let alone read(). Adding if statements in the loop to check for x == '\n' and x == '>' makes little difference. Also putting a StringBuilder to reconstruct lines doesn't affect the timing too much. So this is plenty good for me (at least for now).

Thanks to @Marco13 for mentioning FileChannel.