The test is to open a file, do a simple operation on each row and write it to a new file.
I ran a very scientific test on my Macbook Air by running each of these once or twice for each file.
This is probably the theoretical minimum
time cat data_2M_rows.tsv | awk -F'\t' '{if ($1 > $2) {print $1,$2,$3,$4,$3} else {print $1,$2,$3,$4,$4}}' > data_awk.tsv
real 0m4.643s
user 0m4.543s
sys 0m0.083s
real 0m8.179s
user 0m9.361s
sys 0m0.425s
real 0m9.621s
user 0m9.475s
sys 0m0.088s
real 0m36.028s
user 0m35.140s
sys 0m0.637s
real 1m6.409s
user 1m5.250s
sys 0m0.764s
real 0m24.844s
user 0m24.380s
sys 0m0.367s
real 0m30.500s
user 0m30.930s
sys 0m0.768s
real 0m47.627s
user 0m46.933s
sys 0m0.414s
forget about it