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The Computer Journal 1982 25(2):227-230; doi:10.1093/comjnl/25.2.227
© 1982 by British Computer Society
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Single Versus Double Buffering in Constrained Merging

W. E. Wright *

Department of Computer Science, Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, Carbondale, UK

An analysis is made of a number of aspects of the buffering scheme during the merge phase of an external sort. A discussion is given of the problem of choosing between double buffering, complete single buffering, or something in between, assuming a constraint on the amount of internal memory available for buffering. It is shown that single buffering degrades processing time for a merge pass by an average of from 25% to 37%. It is shown that single buffering is faster than double buffering if and only if there is space available for fewer than 16 buffers.

Received May 1981.

* Department of Computer Science, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Carbondale, Illinois, USA


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