Whilst the data originates on disk and is bigger than memory; the two buffers being merged here are both fully in memory, but combined are close to the limits of memory, hence not enough space to perform the n-way merge.

If the overall pair of data sets are bigger than memory, thus requiring doing it in chunks that fit in memory, why not smaller chunks?

In reply to Re^3: [OT] A measure of 'sortedness'? by RonW
in thread [OT] A measure of 'sortedness'? by BrowserUk

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