Re: overly aggressive memory usage by sort.c

[Pádraig Brady]

On 07/11/2012 12:17 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 07/10/2012 07:31 AM, Jeff Janes wrote:
>> Yes, that fixed the problem.
> 
> OK, thanks for checking; I pushed it into the coreutils
> master on savannah.

Probably worth mentioning in NEWS because
of the significant potential performance impact?

commit 96168117cbde9cb68dabbce2cf34848957462d49
Author: Pádraig Brady <address@hidden>
Date:   Thu Jul 12 15:02:19 2012 +0100

    doc: mention the improved sort memory allocation

    * NEWS: Mention the improvement.

diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index 3aff3a8..836ecec 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -52,6 +52,10 @@ GNU coreutils NEWS                                    -*- 
outline -*-
   or unwritable output.  Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
   rather than after potentially expensive processing.

+  sort by default, will not directly use more than 75% of physical memory,
+  to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
+  [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
+

 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]