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No, It's Not Always Quicker To Do Things In Memory
itwbennett writes: It's a commonly held belief among software developers that avoiding disk access in favor of doing as much work as possible in-memory will results in shorter runtimes. To test this assumption, researchers from the University of Calgary and the University of British Columbia compared the efficiency of alternative ways to create a 1MB string and write it to disk. The results consistently found that doing most of the work in-memory to minimize disk access was significantly slower than just writing out to disk repeatedly (PDF).
It's not even the choice of tools, they seem to willfully misuse the languages to get poor results.
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
The language is not the problem, the code is terrible. They did String concatenation in the most expensive way possible. I'm pretty sure if you used a pre-sized StringBuilder it would be faster in memory.
They also make some very novice benchmarking mistakes.
This is actually a pretty good interview problem. Anyone who writes code like that should not be hired, even for a junior position.