Beating Up on Qsort
2, I’m also interested in they why for the underlying performace of the sort method: it takes more than 100 ns per element, which means 100s of CPU clock cycles and usually even more instructions than that (on a superscalar processor)! As a sanity check, a quick benchmark ( perf record ./bench && perf report) shows that more than 90% of the time spent in this approach is in the sorting routine, qsort - so we are right to focus on this step, rather than say the de-duplication step or the init...
Source: travisdowns.github.io