William L. Maltby wrote: > >>A different algorithm, or something like pre-sorting the data might make >>a huge difference. >> >> > >That can make a huge difference. My post mentioning the order of data >and keys is the "live" equivalent of exactly what Les mentions. Taken a >step further (if this is what you mean Les, sorry for repeating), it may >be possible to sequentially pre-read and sort (or pre-read in indexed >order) and feed that to the application *if* it has the ability to take >data from a sequential file or stream. *BIG* gains possible that way. > > I don't think there is much in the way I can modify how the data is read in. AFIK, it's all based on time data. >Further, if you have access to the source, or have tunable parameters >available (like size of each read call) and can achieve very large reads >of sequential data, system overhead (context switch, ...) is greatly >reduced. What does SAR show the split between user/system time being? >Might be a lot to gain there too. > > Sar reports 85% user, and about 9% system, with a current iowait of 0.27%, so there is not much wait to things. > >