Degenerate file access patterns

[Trevor]

I'm trying to run LilyPond in Google Cloud Functions
<https://cloud.google.com/functions/>, and execution is ridiculously slow
(like 40 seconds compilation vs. 2 seconds on my laptop). A Google Cloud
engineer tested it and reported the following:

"The culprit is that the lilypond binary has a bit sub-optimal file access
pattern (opening the same file thousands of times and reading it byte by
byte, causing a syscall flood - nearly 500K lseek and read operations). On
a local machine, because of this issue, it will spend about 1s in I/O
syscalls, which is half of the total execution time. This currently does
not play nice with our systems, getting it from 1s to over half a minute."

Anybody know why this behavior is exhibited? Is this something that might
be within the power of a programmer new to LilyPond development to fix?