How to get line count of a large file cheaply in Python?

You can't get any better than that.

After all, any solution will have to read the entire file, figure out how many \n you have, and return that result.

Do you have a better way of doing that without reading the entire file? Not sure... The best solution will always be I/O-bound, best you can do is make sure you don't use unnecessary memory, but it looks like you have that covered.

One line, probably pretty fast:

num_lines = sum(1 for line in open('myfile.txt'))