Re: [Pan-users] performance ...

[Joe Zeff]

On 12/08/2008 address@hidden wrote:
> it seems to me that PAN could use some performance tuning.  I cannot 
> believe 
> that it take so long to sort some 1000000 articles.  It are just 
> strings ? 

I take it that you either don't program, or have never studied sorting. 
 I don't program any more, but back when I did, I was very interested, 
for some strange reason, in sorting.  One thing I still remember is 
this: as the number of items to sort goes up, the time goes up, and it's 
never in a 1:1 ratio, although the best get gosh-darn close: triple the 
number of items and the time goes up by a factor of about 3.39.  And, 
even if Pan does a pointer sort, eventually it's going to have to move 
all those strings into the right order, and that's going to take a 
little time, especially if they're on disk instead of RAM.  I'm not 
saying that Pan couldn't be faster, but when you're talking about a 
million articles, it's going to take more than an eyeblink.

--
Joe Zeff
If you can't play with words, what good are they?
http://www.zeff.us http://www.lasfs.info