[R] textConnections so slow!

[Mathieu Drapeau]

Is it normal that it takes a very long time to generate a connection 
object on a big character vector?

This takes a very long time to process:
lines <- readLines ("myBigFile.txt")
data <- scan(textConnection(lines), sep = "\t")

against this that is pretty short to process:
data <- scan("myBigFile.txt", sep = "\t")

Anyone has any clues how to efficiently do that because I need to use a 
textConnection on a big vector?

Thank you,
Mathieu