GNU sort generates a bunch of temporary files for large inputs, and for a lot of linux folks /tmp is mounted as tmpfs (i.e. it's RAM/swap-backed), but it might

GNU sort generates a bunch of temporary files for large inputs, and for a lot of linux folks /tmp is mounted as tmpfs (i.e. it's RAM/swap-backed), but it might do something else on other platforms, or just locate temporary files on disk or something, so that might be one explanation. Or it could be the difference between qsort() from different libcs.