bug#10877: Wimpy external files.

[Paul Eggert]

On 02/25/2012 06:59 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> Some very quick testing here (a while ago),
> shows -S2M -T/dev/shm was as fast or faster than
> big buffers, as well as being "nicer" to the rest
> of the system.

I think this is a great idea for improving the
performance of 'sort' in the future.  It should
work particularly well with multithreaded sort
if we can assume that different cores have different
caches.  Admittedly getting at this info portably
may be a pain.  But perhaps I could assign that
to my students next quarter....