[Coco] the final stage of optimization

[Gary]

On Fri, 20 Nov 2009, Aaron Wolfe wrote:

> Hi, I don't know your project well enough to be sure, but this seems
> like a situation where keeping the data in ram, or at least an index

Years ago, I wrote a database for Basic09 and the only sort I knew at the 
time was bubblesort -- using a ramdisk instead of the physical floppy sped 
it up by two orders of magnitude.

If something like that isn't an option -- since it sounds like the data is 
largely sequential (one long file broken into records) what about treating 
it like tape?  There are a number of well-understood algorithms from the 
50s that might apply -- such as mergesort -- that were designed for 
handling large amounts of data for sorting and searching on machines with 
small ram spaces.

Might be worth a shot?

Peace,
Gary