I have an update on this.
I thought I should at least attempt to bother the Sun support
organisation about this poor state of affairs, i.e - a 7 year known
performance problem with their qsort.
I got the response I am used to getting from commercial support
organisations :-(
(paraphrase)
"yep it performs poorly, but we dont think its going to be changed in
the near future..."
I decided that enough was enough and mailed scott.mcnealy@sun.com with
what I thought was a reasonable summary of the situation.
I recieved (with some surprise I must say) a message from
Graham Lovell<graham@jurassic.eng.sun.com> (Solaris Software Marketing)
to the effect that Sun taking the feedback on board and would modify the
qsort library (bugfix #4489885 for those of you who know who to track
these...I dont - but wouldnt mind knowing...) making patches available
for Solaris 2.6 -> 2.9 in about 4 weeks or so.
I'll keep you posted ...
regards in (pleasant) surprise
Mark