My company's proprietary software generates a log file that is much easier to use if it is parsed. The log parser we all use was written by another employee as a side project, and it has horrible performance.

These log files can grow to 10s of megabytes very quickly, and the parser we currently use has issues if a log file is bigger than 1 megabyte.

So, I want to write a program that can parse this massive amount of text in the shortest amount of time possible. We use Windows exclusively, so running on Windows is a must. Our current implementation runs on a local web server, and I'm convinced that running it as an application would have to be faster.

All suggestions will be helpful. Thanks.