Virtual-Memory Powersort

Abstract

We give a more space-efficient implementation of adaptive mergesort: Virtual-Memory Powersort. Using internal buffering techniques, we significantly reduce the memory consumption of the algorithm; specifically, for sorting $n$ objects the required buffer area is reduced from space for $n/2$ objects to $O(\sqrt{n\log n})$ objects. While this space-efficiency can be achieved (indeed reduced to $O(1)$) conceptually very easily with known inplace merging algorithms, using these as a drop-in replacement for the standard merge algorithm incurs a substantial slow-down. Virtual-Memory Powersort, by contrast, uses the same number of moves and comparisons as previous Powersort implementations up to an additive $O(n)$ term. We report on an empirical running-time study comparing our implementation against other Powersort variants and state-of-the-art stable sorting methods, demonstrating that almost in-place stable sorting can be achieved with negligible overhead in many scenarios.

ESA 2026