More details at http://kmkeen.com/gz-sort/

perform a merge sort over a multi-GB gz compressed file

Quickstart

git clone https://github.com/keenerd/gz-sort; cd gz-sort; make; ./gz-sort -h

Needs the zlib headers and probably only builds on GNU/Linux.

use: gz-sort [-u] [-S n] [-P n] source.gz dest.gz

options:
   -h: help
   -u: unique
   -S n: size of presort, supports k/M/G suffix
         a traditional in-memory sort (default n=1M)
   -P n: use multiple threads (experimental, default disabled)
   -T: pass through (debugging/benchmarks)

estimating run time, crudely:
    time gzip -dc data.gz | gzip > /dev/null
    unthreaded: seconds * entropy * (log2(uncompressed_size/S)+2)
    (where 'entropy' is a fudge-factor between 1.5 for an
    already sorted file and 3 for a shuffled file)
    S and P are the corresponding settings
    multithreaded: maybe unthreaded/sqrt(P) ?

estimated disk use:
    2x source.gz

Minimum requirements to sort a terabyte:

• 4MB ram (yes, megabyte)
• free disk space equal to the twice the compressed source.gz

Known bugs to fix

Email me if you are using gz-sort and any of these omissions are causing you trouble. For that matter, email me if you find something not on this list too.

• Does not build on non-gnu systems.
• Sqrt(threads) is a terrible ratio.
• No support for uncompressed stdin streams.
• Breaks if a line is longer than the buffer size.
• Lacks all error handling.
• Ugly code with lots of ways to refactor.
• Output could use predictable flushes.

Performance tweaks to try

• Profile!
• Parallelize the final n-way merge. This will require adding IPC.
• Filter unique lines during the earlier passes.
• Try out zlib-ng, about half of cpu time is spent on (un)gzipping.
• Improve memory estimation, it lowballs and that hurts the presort.
• Byte-based seeking instead of line-counting.