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On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:

I recently advised a Googler who was sorting a large dataset and
running out of memory. My analysis of the situation was that he was
sorting a huge list of short lines of the form "shortstring,integer"
with a key function that returned a tuple of the form ("shortstring",
integer).

As Raymond pointed out, a change I made for 3.2 significantly shrinks the memory footprint of sorting with a key (although it's still more memory-intensive than sorting with cmp).

He could reduce the memory footprint further by sorting in two passes instead of using a tuple, leveraging the fact that Python guarantees a stable sort. In 3.2 or later, this technique will require roughly twice as much memory as just storing the list:

biglist.sort(key=lambda s: int(s.split(',')\[1\])) # Sort by the integer

biglist.sort(key=lambda s: s.split(',')\[0\]) # Sort by the shortstring

I think the use cases are pretty narrow where there's plenty of memory for storing the list but not enough to store two copies.

--
Daniel Stutzbach