TL;DR: Things get faster if you disable validation and parse dates using more specialized code. Duh.
It's humorous when someone who presumably cares about performance tells you they use Python. Python is a wonderful language, but performance is not what it is designed for. Basically _anything_ that does not require an interpreter to run will be 10-30x faster on the same hardware, and most will also consume less RAM and be able to use more than one core on the system efficiently. It used to be that Python's lack of performance didn't matter because disks and networks were so slow things were IO bound. In more and more cases that's just not true anymore. You could be easily reading at 1GB+/sec and pushing 10-20Gbps to NICs, depending on the hardware.
It's humorous when someone who presumably cares about performance tells you they use Python. Python is a wonderful language, but performance is not what it is designed for. Basically _anything_ that does not require an interpreter to run will be 10-30x faster on the same hardware, and most will also consume less RAM and be able to use more than one core on the system efficiently. It used to be that Python's lack of performance didn't matter because disks and networks were so slow things were IO bound. In more and more cases that's just not true anymore. You could be easily reading at 1GB+/sec and pushing 10-20Gbps to NICs, depending on the hardware.