It's been a while since I've studied the ASCII parser's performance. I just added another once-per-record trim() operation, and I notice that a Matcher object is created each record. Also there's an array for the fields which is created. So I think there are performance improvements to be won, and this requires some careful study. Also I suspect ChatGPT would write an optimal code for this.
See also https://sourceforge.net/p/autoplot/bugs/2903/