I'm not sure why, but on my Macbook Pro running lion I get slow updates when I issue "tail -f" on a log file that is being written to. I used to use this command all the time at my last company but that was typically on Linux machines. The only thing I can think of that would possibly slow the updates are buffering of output and/or maybe a different update interval on a Mac vs. Linux. I've tried with several commands all which write to stout relatively quickly but give slow updates to the tail command. Any ideas?

Update I am merely running a python script with a bunch of prints in it and redirecting to a file vi "> my output.log". I expect to see updates near real time but that doesn't seem to be the case.