which sorting technique is efficient?
<answer> Quicksort and Mergesort <context> Mergesort is guarenteed to be O(n lg n), but has a higher memory footprint than quick sort. Quicksort generally runs faster than mergesort, but under ~some~ circumstances it can degrade to quadratic running time. Radix sort is O(n*r) where r is the length of the numbers. To determine if radix is better than your chosen lg-n method, do this: So if n is less than 2^32 (4 billion) then use the lg-n algorithm. Personally, I'd use quick sort, shuffling it if I have to in order to prevent it from degrading.