Hey everyone, I'm trying to understand the trade‑offs between quicksort and mergesort for large datasets. Which one tends to perform better in practice when memory usage is a concern?
Hey everyone, I'm trying to understand the trade‑offs between quicksort and mergesort for large datasets. Which one tends to perform better in practice when memory usage is a concern?
Quicksort usually wins on average because it’s in‑place, but its worst‑case is O(n²). If you can guarantee a good pivot (e.g., median‑of‑three), it’s safe. Mergesort is stable and always O(n log n) but needs extra O(n) space.
For external sorting where data doesn’t fit in RAM, mergesort (or a variation like external merge sort) is preferred. It works well with sequential I/O.