I have large datasets- 100 million rows, 100+ columns.
When I read them in R using fread, it gets done quite fast (25 to 30 mins). Same thing takes almost an hour in Python. I had read previously that Pyhon is faster than R but I am seeing the opposite trend.

Sounds like a dumb question but can someone explain why this is?

In Python
import pandas as pd df = pd.read_csv("filename.csv")

In r
library(data.table) df=fread("filename.csv")