how have you created the scalars inside @numbers?

If you have read them from a file and never used them as numbers before, comparing then numerically also forces their internal structure to grow to accomodate the NV and/or IV slot.

Also, in not too old versions of perl, there was a bug that caused numbers to be converted to strings inside sort even when numeric comparison was used.

Besides that, in general, perl mergesort uses the memory equivalent to two pointers per value, one to pass the value on the stack and the other for the merge. Sort::Key functions use the same plus the memory required for the key (for instance, 4 bytes for an integer key on a 32bits computer or 8 bytes for a floating point number).

In reply to Re^9: Howto Avoid Memory Problem in List::MoreUtils by salva
in thread Howto Avoid Memory Problem in List::MoreUtils by Anonymous Monk

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