Methods and system for browsing large text files

A system and associated methods for rapidly displaying large text files. The system preferably includes a client process in communications with a server process. In a first embodiment, the client process receives text from the server process, parses the received text to index the text according to line numbers and saves the parsed text structures in a local cache memory. Users requests for display of specific lines of the text are thereby performed rapidly in accordance with the indexing and caching of the parsed text regardless of the size of the text file. In a second embodiment, the server process receives desired ("hot") line numbers with the request for text file retrieval. The server process then returns portions ("chunks") of the text file in other than sequential order. Specifically, the server process returns "hot chunks" (e.g., chunks containing hot lines) of the requested text file before returning other chunks of the file. The client process then displays the requested "hot lines" quickly regardless of the size of the text file.