beagrep is made even faster
beagrep -e readlink
in my android source tree now takes only 0.230
second on Dell Optiplex 960 (cache hot).
The trick I used is to simply enable Mono's AOT option (see git log).
But sadly, I can't improve it on my macbookair with debian installation to the same speed as on my Optiplex 960. This is very strange since the macbookair is a more powerful machine with better CPU and SSD (which does not matter when cache is hot though).
The time on macbookair is consistently ~0.8 second slower than Optiplex 960, AOT or not AOT.