We try to answer the question of why is quicksort faster than heapsort and then we dig deeper into these algorithms’ hardware efficiency. The goal: making them faster.

We try to answer the question of why is quicksort faster than heapsort and then we dig deeper into these algorithms’ hardware efficiency. The goal: making them faster.
Big O notation is commonly used to describe algorithm performance. But modern hardware makes performance analysis much harder than it used to be. In this short article we give three interesting examples to illustrate the limits of big O notation.