Question

I have a buffer receiving data, which means the data are like ‘stream’ and have latency in ‘IO’. The way I am doing now is when the buffer is full, using qsort to sort the buffer and write the result to disk. but there is obvious latency when doing qsort, so I am looking for some other sorting algorithms that may start sorting while the data is being added to the buffer, in order to reduce time consumed overall.

don’t know if I have made myself clear and leave any comments if needed, thanks

Answer 1

Heap sort keeps the data permanently in a partially sorted condition and so is comparable to Insertion sort. But it is substantially quicker and has a worst case of O(n log n) compared with O(n²) for Insertion Sort.

How is this going to work? Presumably at some point you have to stop reading from the stream, store what you have sorted, and start reading a new set of data?