testing sorters and memory allocation

Learning computers at this stage, I've always been the type of person to question things.

Our lesson in class is to test our bubble sort, merge sort, and quick sort with a pytest module called cProfile.  My results are spectacularly slow, as expected, but the really odd thing is that my bubble sort is about the same speed as merge sort,  and my quick sort is exceedingly slower then both on a random number list of size 800.

After all the tests I ran on my computer involving randint, and the timeit(), I think I have a new theory about these sorts.

Because my memory is so low, the two sorts that are storing to memory to sort out the Doubly Linked List, (merge sort, quick sort)  are spilling into my hard drive, and the retrieval of those pieces are making the sort take an even longer time then it should.

I asked in my class discussion board if it's worth looking into, because I think with the kind of advanced systems they use for databases this would never be an issue for anyone other then myself on a personal computer like Hal.  Answer: It would be extremely hard to analyse with Python, but it is a huge part of how those data structures operate.

I get why bubble sort is slow, and I can see how the merge sort and quick sort are the faster options,  But is it really ok that they rely so heavily on transporting data back and forth through the memory so much?

Probably over-thinking it.  Not sure how I'm going to proceed through the lessons when my results are the opposite of what they should be to tune performance.  If I'm tuning performance on my machine,  relying on memory would be the worst thing to do.

Maybe that's my route to an original idea.  How to sort data without relying on storing data to memory to do it.  I have a feeling it's already been done, or just over my head, but.... once again.  Why not?

Time to google. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

playing with color in powershell python

Here's a bit I'm working on.  I've discovered I love doing Ascii.  Examples of how to use the color changing escape.  I got a table from StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/287871/print-in-terminal-with-colors-using-python the charts are way at the bottom. So far accurate for me.  def prettyjunk ( self ): # 1 is bold, 0 is plain, 2 is dull text_red = ' \x1b [1;31;40m' stop_color = ' \x1b [0m' text_blue = ' \x1b [1;34;40m' text_green = ' \x1b [1;32;40m' text_purple = ' \x1b [1;35;40m' text_lightblue = ' \x1b [1;36;40m' text_white = ' \x1b [1;37;40m' a_green_at = ( f " { text_green } @ { stop_color } " ) a_red_at = ( f " { text_red } @ { stop_color } " ) print ( f " { text_red } This should be Red. { stop_color } " ) print ( f "
Read more

JavaScript Ascii animation with while loops and console.log

I was working on figuring out while loops for an exercise in LearnJavaScriptTheHardWay  by Zed Shaw,  and I decided to do this: The red text console.logs were for debugging, and will take over the animation if the comments are removed. The bold red number is the point at which the loop stops.  My CPU didn't have too much trouble with that large number, but I'd recommend dialing it down if your CPU is slow. Also if your CPU is really fast, you'll have to change the pause to something much lower to see the animation better.  That too is in a loop, so the more that pause happens, the more loops your CPU is running.   Link: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9006988/node-js-on-windows-how-to-clear-console To clear screen as described in link above, uncomment the bold purple comment I tried to comment the code to help learners see what I did,  any comments or suggestions, feel free to drop em in!                      ex16_ASCII.js //Trying to make a comma
Read more

playing with trigonometry sin in pygame

Image
Ok I am so far from understanding, so don't take this as any kind of math lesson. Also, every time I thought I knew what I was doing.... pygame would show me differently. Still a work in progress, but for now, something to play with. Update: SinWaveTime class added to produce that particular weaving effect Tinkering with the different sin wave variables: I wrote this piece separate from my 3D experiment to see how to manipulate the sin wave. While trying to use time as the factor to move my pygame draw circle on the x-axis, i got this crazy little doo-dad : I don't think it's drawing two circles at once, but if I figure out what the heck it's doing I'll let you know.  Or hey if you know, drop a comment.  I don't know if my comments are just not working, or no one wants to. So, here's some pygame code to play with the sin wave.  Alter the different variables to see it in action. picture of SinWave.move_with_time() see changes, SinWaveTime c
Read more