Added info about highwater heap-memory use for the sortperf.py tests; + a

couple of minor edits elsewhere.
This commit is contained in:
Tim Peters 2002-08-08 01:55:16 +00:00
parent 6063e2615f
commit 6c511e6d1c

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@ -167,6 +167,34 @@ Comparison with Python's Samplesort Hybrid
But timsort "should be" slower than samplesort on ~sort, so it's hard
to count that it isn't on some boxes as a strike against it <wink>.
+ Here's the highwater mark for the number of heap-based temp slots (4
bytes each on this box) needed by each test, again with arguments
"15 20 1":
2**i *sort \sort /sort 3sort +sort %sort ~sort =sort !sort
32768 16384 0 0 6256 0 10821 12288 0 16383
65536 32766 0 0 21652 0 31276 24576 0 32767
131072 65534 0 0 17258 0 58112 49152 0 65535
262144 131072 0 0 35660 0 123561 98304 0 131071
524288 262142 0 0 31302 0 212057 196608 0 262143
1048576 524286 0 0 312438 0 484942 393216 0 524287
Discussion: The tests that end up doing (close to) perfectly balanced
merges (*sort, !sort) need all N//2 temp slots (or almost all). ~sort
also ends up doing balanced merges, but systematically benefits a lot from
the preliminary pre-merge searches described under "Merge Memory" later.
%sort approaches having a balanced merge at the end because the random
selection of elements to replace is expected to produce an out-of-order
element near the midpoint. \sort, /sort, =sort are the trivial one-run
cases, needing no merging at all. +sort ends up having one very long run
and one very short, and so gets all the temp space it needs from the small
temparray member of the MergeState struct (note that the same would be
true if the new random elements were prefixed to the sorted list instead,
but not if they appeared "in the middle"). 3sort approaches N//3 temp
slots twice, but the run lengths that remain after 3 random exchanges
clearly has very high variance.
A detailed description of timsort follows.
@ -460,13 +488,13 @@ Galloping with a Broken Leg
---------------------------
So why don't we always gallop? Because it can lose, on two counts:
1. While we're willing to endure small per-run overheads, per-comparison
1. While we're willing to endure small per-merge overheads, per-comparison
overheads are a different story. Calling Yet Another Function per
comparison is expensive, and gallop_left() and gallop_right() are
too long-winded for sane inlining.
2. Ignoring function-call overhead, galloping can-- alas --require more
comparisons than linear one-at-time search, depending on the data.
2. Galloping can-- alas --require more comparisons than linear one-at-time
search, depending on the data.
#2 requires details. If A[0] belongs before B[0], galloping requires 1
compare to determine that, same as linear search, except it costs more