os x cat or grep like commands on large files are extremely slow

I have a macbook pro 2015 with an ssd. Doing a cat to a file is incredibly slow like 5 lines per seconds. I removed *.asl files but it's still extremely slow. I can't seem to find posts of people who suffer specifically the same issue. Same grep on a 2gb file takes couple seconds on my much worse linux box yet rmbp2015 with blazingly fast ssd fails?

I can't diagnose the issue to find a solution to begin with.