Syscalls are not the only consumer of wall clock time, which is what was measured. > To read in binary, you open with 'rb' and not just 'r'. No. "The default

Syscalls are not the only consumer of wall clock time, which is what was measured. > To read in binary, you open with 'rb' and not just 'r'. No. "The default translation mode is 'b'." [1] And even in 't' mode, it's still reading bytes in PHP vs UCS-2 characters in C#. [1] https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php