BTW, Shaun, this is Glen's patch from a year ago. Also, forgot to CC the mailing list, so I'm gonna paste my last email:
Hi Shaun > > As for buffer size, I highly doubt using 8 mb, even if we're magically > > guaranteed to get 100% of the cpu cache, would work better than a larger > > buffer. > > > > The main reason would be for larger files, you'd have to repeatedly > > write > > temporary files out to disk, then merge those temporary files. Whatever > > time you save talking to cache is more than lost to the extra time talking > > to disk. > > What if the temporary files were stored in RAM (i.e. tmpfs) rather than > on magnetic disk? I think I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say... But the file stored in ram would be in a buffer. --buffer-size sets the size of this buffer, i.e. how much space in RAM you want to allocate to sort.
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