Discussion Use LC_ALL=C for big ASCII sorts Comparison of sorting 100MB of email: [jim@mbp ~]$ dd if=gmail.mbox of=gmail.sort bs=1m count=100 100+0 records in 100+0 records out 104857600 bytes transferred in 0.084819 secs (1236253643 bytes/sec) [jim@mbp ~]$ /usr/bin/time -l sort <gmail.sort >/dev/null 28.58 real 28.21 user 0.26 sys 480497664 maximum resident set size 118887 page reclaims 11071 involuntary context switches [jim@mbp ~]$ LC_ALL=C /usr/bin/time -l sort <gmail.sort >/dev/null 1.49 real 1.37 user 0.11 sys 188440576 maximum resident set size 54690 page reclaims 1029 involuntary context switches 12 points prirun 4 years ago 3 comments