sort 5.2.1 is VERY slow

[Dick Hessel]

Hi,
I was looking at some data in a 6MB text file using sort.
When I used the --key flag, the speed of sort was embarrassingly bad.
It was *~80 times slower* on my new Athlon64 processor as on
an old 1GHz P3 using cygwin's sort under Windows 2000!

I ran
grep "konnect 1" Out_konnect | sort --key=4 -n |less

on my 2.4GHz Athlon64 processor.  The file size is
home $  grep "konnect 1" Out_konnect |wc
265680 1062720 6159635

The command on Suse Linux ran for over 7 minutes.

The file is on the Linux machine, however, I can access the same
files via samba from an old Windows PC.  While the Linux sort was running,
I ran the same command on the 1GHz P3 Windows 2000 system using cygwin's
sort.  It ran in about 5 seconds.

The slow version of sort is

sort (coreutils) 5.2.1
Written by Mike Haertel and Paul Eggert.

Copyright (C) 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

I'm running Suse Linux
Linux linux 2.6.4-52-default #1 Wed Apr 7 02:15:23 UTC 2004 x86_64 
x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux


The fast, cygwin version of sort on Windows is

home $ sort --version
sort (textutils) 2.0.21
Written by Mike Haertel and Paul Eggert.

Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Dick
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