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).

how have you created the scalars inside @numbers?

I am creating the array with rand, so they should already be IVs:

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use sort '_quicksort';

sub mem {
    my( $usage ) =  `tasklist /NH /FI \"pid eq $$\" ` =~ m[ (\S+) \s+ 
+K \s* $ ]x;
    return $usage;
}

$| = 1;

my @a; $#a = 20e6;
$a[ $_ ] = int rand 32767 for 0 .. 20e6;

printf "Mem after building array: %s kb\n", mem;

@a = sort{ $a <=> $b } @a;

printf "Mem after sorting array: %s kb\n", mem;
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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.

That was it. I'm still using 5.8.6 as my general install. Running the above script under 5.8.8 fixes that problem. Many thanks for your patience.

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