imho first use the native sort algorythm of your compiler. Usually this is
rather good because the standard compiler benchmarks test it and the
library programmers try hard. Then you can try so beat them ;)

8 million integers is about 32 million bytes and will stay within memory
for machines with RAM >32MB (like 64MB). I think that the time will be
rather short (seconds) on a Pentium class machine. (I am comparing to
database join/sort and search engine indexer operation on Unix).

Peter

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