Here are a few tips to improve the performance of grep on large files:
- Prefix your command with 
LC_ALL=C, in order to use theClocale with its smaller ASCII charset, instead of UTF-8 - Use 
grep -Fto search for a fixed string (if possible), rather than a regex - Remove the 
-ioption, if you don't need it 
LC_ALL=C grep -F searchString largeFile