[HEADS-UP] BSD sort is the default sort in -CURRENT

[Oleg Moskalenko]

Hi

As promised, I am supplying an example of comparison between several sort programs.

The test file is a randomly generated 1,000,000 lines, each line contain a single floating point number. 

We are going to sort it three ways - as text, as -n numeric sort, and as -g numeric sort, with 4 programs: 
1) Old BSD/GNU sort 5.3.0
2) New GNU sort 8.15
3) New BSD sort, single threaded
4) New BSD sort, multi-threaded

The system is a 3-CPUs system, 1.5Gb of RAM, FreeBSD version 8.2. All times are in seconds. Locale C.

==============================================

     TEXT SORT

                     sys     user      real
Old BSD/GNU sort:    0.0     1.692     2.008
New GNU sort:        0.0     2.279     1.605
New BSD sort, st:    0.0     1.964     2.300
New BSD sort, mt:    0.0     2.385     1.897

==============================================

     NUMERIC SORT -n  

                     sys     user      real
Old BSD/GNU sort:    0.0     4.357     4.674
New GNU sort:        0.0     8.839     5.134
New BSD sort, st:    0.0     5.308     5.592
New BSD sort, mt:    0.0     4.581     2.489

==============================================

     NUMERIC SORT -g

                     sys     user      real
Old BSD/GNU sort:    0.0     45.378    45.630
New GNU sort:       ~450    ~121      ~300
New BSD sort, st:    0.33    4.334     5.992
New BSD sort, mt:    11.140  4.624     8.983

===============================================

Thanks
Oleg