speed up grep

I had a list of gene names in txt file. There are around 500 genes with one gene name in one line, and I want to filter the gtf file from ensemble Homo_sapines.GRCh37.74gtf.gz

the gtf file contains 2244857 lines. I used grep to do it, but it takes very long (~1 hour).

what I used:

zcat Homo_sapines.GRCh37.74gtf.gz | grep -f gene_names.txt -w > my_genes.gtf

I searched on line, and found several posts in stackoverflow to speed up grep:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14602963/faster-grep-function-for-big-27gb-files
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13913014/grepping-a-huge-file-80gb-any-way-to-speed-it-up
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9066609/fastest-possible-grep

options to speed up:

1) Prefix your grep command with LC_ALL=C to use the C locale instead of UTF-8.

2) Use fgrep because you're searching for a fixed string, not a regular expression

I then used:

zcat Homo_sapines.GRCh37.74gtf.gz | LC_ALL=C fgrep -f gene_names.txt -w > my_genes.gtf

It runs much faster!