is the performance of sort command affected by buffer size?

boris

I have load of huge apache log to sort, it takes almost a day to sort 4GB apache log. I would like to know the performance if I set the buffer size to 100MB or above (I have not set it explicitly, and I dont know the default buffer size....I just see a list of the temporary sorting files with the size of 23MB showing up in my disk)

woboyle

What are you using to sort the data set? The system sort command? If so, then I expect that if you have adequate system memory, increasing it to some bigger number than the default will help performance - possibly significantly.

marc

Of course it's affected by buffer size.

I'm pretty sure the larger the buffer size is the better

Regards