Is there anything faster than readLines in R?

This is interesting and I hope you are right. Please help me understand this better. By C I meant the C language. Apologies for the confusion. I am putting print statements in my code and I see the slow down happens at the readLines and not at the point where the data "arrive" in R. Could it be that the specific string that arrives has many blank spaces or something that "delays" readLines?
Here are my print statements to make this more clear:

    print("in r1")
    con <- socketConnection(host="localhost", port = 8080, blocking=TRUE,
                            server=TRUE, open="r+")
#    on.exit(close(con))
    print("in r2")
    helloTall <- readLines(con,1)
    print("in r3")

The transition between r2 and r3 takes ages.. 1 minute in this case which is a lot for 5 numbers.