Weird profiling behaviour

Ketil Z. Malde ketil@ii.uib.no
26 Jun 2002 11:20:21 +0200


Hi,

I have what I think is a really strange problem.  I have a fair sized
problem, which involves sorting a data set, first on labels (which are
Strings) and then on scores (which are Ints).

The strange thing is that string sorting is *vastly* faster than int
scoring!  Now, I've tried modifying the sorting routinges, moving them
into the same module, and so on, to no avail.  Is there any likely
explanation?  The pipeline is basically

         sortBy int_cmp . compound_equal . sortBy string_cmp

I hesitate to post the code, since it's part of a rather large
program, and in the hope that somebody will pop up and say that oh,
yes, it's a well know feature of 'sortBy'.  Or that it's an artifact
of profiling.  Or something like that.

Any, and I mean any, suggestions really, really welcome.

-kzm
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants