Re: Using quicksort and a merge step to significantly improve on tuplesort's single run "external sort"

On 30/07/15 02:05, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> Since heapification is now a big fraction of the total cost of a sort
> sometimes, even where the heap invariant need not be maintained for
> any length of time afterwards, it might be worth revisiting the patch
> to make that an O(n) rather than a O(log n) operation [3].
                                    O(n log n) ?

Heapification is O(n) already, whether siftup (existing) or down.

It might be worthwhile comparing actual times with a quicksort, given
that a sorted array is trivially a well-formed heap (the reverse is not
true) and that quicksort seems to be cache-friendly.  Presumably there
will be a crossover N where the cache-friendliness k reduction
loses out to the log n penalty for doing a full sort; below this
it would be useful.

You could then declare the tape buffer to be the leading tranche of
work-mem (and dump it right away) and the heap to start with the
remainder.
-- 
Cheers, Jeremy