Re: Why the memory usage of sort does not seem to increase as the input file size increases?

[Peng Yu]

> Sort takes a divide and conquer approach,
> by sorting parts of the input to temporary files,
> and then merging the results with a bounded amount of memory.
>
> sort currently defaults to using a large memory buffer
> to minimize overhead associated with writing and reading
> temp files, so you may be seeing just this large memory
> allocation each time.
>
> The memory allocation can be controlled with --buffer-size

If I have enough memory, is it always faster to sort without using
temp files. How to force sort always use memory only? Thanks.

-- 
Regards,
Peng