TERRIBLE sort performance in RedHat 9.0

[Mike Westall]

The file fack.0-1.dif is an ASCII text file of 54,853 lines
with 4 columns of numeric data.  I noticed very slow performance
when trying to sort on a RH9.0 system:

projects/nettraf/sriram/traces0 ==> time  sort -n -k2 < fack.0-1.dif > 
junk.srt

real    7m42.905s
user    7m42.650s
sys     0m0.090s

So I copied /bin/sort from a RH7.2 system and renamed it fsort
and got a reduction in elapsed time from almost 8 minutes to
1/2 second!!!  Note that the output files are IDENTICAL.

projects/nettraf/sriram/traces0 ==> time fsort -n -k2 < fack.0-1.dif > 
junk2.srt

real    0m0.511s
user    0m0.390s
sys     0m0.020s
projects/nettraf/sriram/traces0 ==> diff junk2.srt junk.srt
projects/nettraf/sriram/traces0 ==> wc -l fack.0-1.dif
  54853 fack.0-1.dif
projects/nettraf/sriram/traces0 ==> ls -l fack.0-1.dif
-rw-------    1 westall  westall   2762463 Oct  5 18:26 fack.0-1.dif
projects/nettraf/sriram/traces0 ==>

This behavior is infinitely repeatable and applies to ALL
RH 9.0 systems I've tried but NO RH 7.x systems.

Any ideas whats up with this????

thanks,
mike

James M. Westall
Professor of Computer Science
Clemson University
Clemson SC 29634