Re: Problem with sort ... textutils-2.0.21 on TRU64 v5.1a

[Bob Proulx]

> > 4. Amount of RAM ... = 5gb.
> 
> Which should certainly be enough to sort an 800 MB file in memory
> directly without using any temporary files.  So it is obtaining an
> incorrect value for the amount of memory there.
> 
> Would it be possible for you to debug what lib/physmem.c is returning
> for memory on your system for the two library routines physmem_total()
> and physmem_available()?

Newer versions of GNU sort have an option to specify the amount of
memory to use for sorting.  If you could try that on True64 then I am
sure that with 5GB of memory that you would sort without using any
temporary files.  I had forgotten about that previously.  And I am
sure if you time it there will be a large performance improvement.

    -S, --buffer-size=SIZE    use SIZE for main memory buffer

Therefore something like this?

  sort --buffer-size=1G bigfile > bigsortedfile

Bob