It's In The Sorting, Dude!

Published: January 1, 2008, 2:12 pm

I just finished consulting on an interesting project: this client's inhouse web application had been working great until recently when it seemed to take longer and longer to respond to requests. Being it is an SOA application that uses AJAX all over, speed is of the essence for an overall satisfactory user experience. A couple of times, the IT guys had upgraded the servers running the webapp (hardware), but the problem lingered. So obviously the webapp itself was to blame - but where would the issue be in an application that's been relatively bug free since its inception?Long story short, the sorting algorithms used were to blame. I couldn't identify which one was being used (proprietary or more advanced than I have learned?), but magic happened when I replaced the sorter with the well-known mergesort algorithm. In preliminary testing, the problem is pretty much gone for the size of live data the company typically works with. Amazing!My real excitement though is in the fact that I got

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