C# Data structure Algorithm - language-agnostic

Question

I recently gave a interview to one of the TOP software company. I was completely stuck with only one question asked by interviewer to me, which was
Q. I have a machine with 512 mb / 1 GB RAM and I have to sort a file (XML, or any) of 4 GB size. How will I proceed? What will be the data structure, and which sorting algorithm will I use and how?
Do you think it is achievable? If yes then can you please explain?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The answer the interviewer might want maybe how you manage to efficiently sort the data set which exceeds system memory.The following section is taken from Wikipedia:
Memory usage patterns and index
sorting
When the size of the array to be
sorted approaches or exceeds the
available primary memory, so that
(much slower) disk or swap space must
be employed, the memory usage pattern
of a sorting algorithm becomes
important, and an algorithm that might
have been fairly efficient when the
array fit easily in RAM may become
impractical. In this scenario, the
total number of comparisons becomes
(relatively) less important, and the
number of times sections of memory
must be copied or swapped to and from
the disk can dominate the performance
characteristics of an algorithm. Thus,
the number of passes and the
localization of comparisons can be
more important than the raw number of
comparisons, since comparisons of
nearby elements to one another happen
at system bus speed (or, with caching,
even at CPU speed), which, compared to
disk speed, is virtually
instantaneous.
For example, the popular recursive
quicksort algorithm provides quite
reasonable performance with adequate
RAM, but due to the recursive way that
it copies portions of the array it
becomes much less practical when the
array does not fit in RAM, because it
may cause a number of slow copy or
move operations to and from disk. In
that scenario, another algorithm may
be preferable even if it requires more
total comparisons.
One way to work around this problem,
which works well when complex records
(such as in a relational database) are
being sorted by a relatively small key
field, is to create an index into the
array and then sort the index, rather
than the entire array. (A sorted
version of the entire array can then
be produced with one pass, reading
from the index, but often even that is
unnecessary, as having the sorted
index is adequate.) Because the index
is much smaller than the entire array,
it may fit easily in memory where the
entire array would not, effectively
eliminating the disk-swapping problem.
This procedure is sometimes called
"tag sort".[5]
Another technique for overcoming the
memory-size problem is to combine two
algorithms in a way that takes
advantages of the strength of each to
improve overall performance. For
instance, the array might be
subdivided into chunks of a size that
will fit easily in RAM (say, a few
thousand elements), the chunks sorted
using an efficient algorithm (such as
quicksort or heapsort), and the
results merged as per mergesort. This
is less efficient than just doing
mergesort in the first place, but it
requires less physical RAM (to be
practical) than a full quicksort on
the whole array.
Techniques can also be combined. For
sorting very large sets of data that
vastly exceed system memory, even the
index may need to be sorted using an
algorithm or combination of algorithms
designed to perform reasonably with
virtual memory, i.e., to reduce the
amount of swapping required.

Answer 2

Use Divide and Conquer.
Here's the pseudocode:
function sortFile(file)
if fileTooBigForMemory(file)
pair<firstHalfOfFile, secondHalfOfFile> = breakIntoTwoHalves()
sortFile(firstHalfOfFile)
sortFile(secondHalfOfFile)
else
sortCharactersInFile(file)
endif
MergeTwoHalvesInOrder(firstHalfOfFile, secondHalfOfFile)
end
Two well-known algorithms that fall in to the divide and conquer category are merge sort and quick sort algorithm. So you could use them for implementation.
As for the data structure, a char array containing characters in the file could do. If you want to be more object oriented, wrap it in a class called File:
class File {
private char[] characters;
//methods to access and mutate 'characters'
}

Answer 3

There is a nice post on the Guido van Rossum blog which has something to suggest. Beware that the code is in Python.

Answer 4

Split your file to chunks which fit into memory.
Sort each chunk using quick sort and save it to a separate file.
Then merge result files and you get your result.

Answer 5

I would use a multiway merge. There is an excellent book called Managing Gigabytes that shows several different ways of doing it. They also go into sort based inversion for files that are larger than physical memory. Look around page 240 for a pretty detailed algorithm on sorting through chunks on disk.
The post above is correct in that you split the file and sort each portion.
Say you have the 4GB file and only want to load a max of 512MB. That means you need to split the file into 8 chunks minimum. If you are not sure how much extra overhead your sort is going to use, you might even double that number to be safe to 16 chunks.
The 16 files are then sorted one at a time to be in a guaranteed order. So now you have chunk 0-15 as sorted files.
Now you open 16 file handles to those files and read one entry at a time, writing the lowest one to the final output. Since you know each of the files is already sorted, taking the lowest from each means you are then writing them in the correct order to the final output.
I have used such a system in C# for sorting large collections of spam words from emails. The original system required all of them to load into RAM in order to sort them and build a dictionary for spam counts. Once the file grew over 2 GB the in memory structures were requiring 6+GB of RAM and taking over 24 hours to sort due to paging and VM. The new system using the chunking above sorted the entire file in under 40 minutes. That was an impressive speedup for such a simple change.
I played with various load options (1/4 system memory per chunk, etc). It turned out that for our situation the best option was about 1/10 system memory. Then Windows had enough memory left over for decent File I/O buffering to offset the increased file traffic. And the machine was left very responsive to other processes running on it.
And yes, I do frequently like to ask these types of questions in interviews as well. Just to see if people can think outside the box. What do you do when you can't just use .Sort() on a list?

Answer 6

Just simulate a virtual memory, overload the array index operator, []
Find a quicksort implementation that sorts an array in C++ or C#. overload the indexer operator [] which will read from and save to file. That way, you can just plug existing sort algorithms, you just change what happens behind the scenes on those []

Answer 7

here's one example of simulating virtual memory on C#
source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa288465(VS.71).aspx
// indexer.cs
// arguments: indexer.txt
using System;
using System.IO;
// Class to provide access to a large file
// as if it were a byte array.
public class FileByteArray
{
Stream stream; // Holds the underlying stream
// used to access the file.
// Create a new FileByteArray encapsulating a particular file.
public FileByteArray(string fileName)
{
stream = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Open);
}
// Close the stream. This should be the last thing done
// when you are finished.
public void Close()
{
stream.Close();
stream = null;
}
// Indexer to provide read/write access to the file.
public byte this[long index] // long is a 64-bit integer
{
// Read one byte at offset index and return it.
get
{
byte[] buffer = new byte[1];
stream.Seek(index, SeekOrigin.Begin);
stream.Read(buffer, 0, 1);
return buffer[0];
}
// Write one byte at offset index and return it.
set
{
byte[] buffer = new byte[1] {value};
stream.Seek(index, SeekOrigin.Begin);
stream.Write(buffer, 0, 1);
}
}
// Get the total length of the file.
public long Length
{
get
{
return stream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.End);
}
}
}
// Demonstrate the FileByteArray class.
// Reverses the bytes in a file.
public class Reverse
{
public static void Main(String[] args)
{
// Check for arguments.
if (args.Length == 0)
{
Console.WriteLine("indexer <filename>");
return;
}
FileByteArray file = new FileByteArray(args[0]);
long len = file.Length;
// Swap bytes in the file to reverse it.
for (long i = 0; i < len / 2; ++i)
{
byte t;
// Note that indexing the "file" variable invokes the
// indexer on the FileByteStream class, which reads
// and writes the bytes in the file.
t = file[i];
file[i] = file[len - i - 1];
file[len - i - 1] = t;
}
file.Close();
}
}
Use the above code to roll your own array class. Then just use any array sorting algorithms.