Eh... if the algorithm is dominating your apps runtime the data it loads is probably in the fastest storage device you have that fits. Whether that's L1 cache or a cluster of a dozen computers each with a TB of ram. If not, you can probably optimize by making that the case. At which point `n` is actually the size of the data for the slow algorithm.
I agree you don't often care about this scaling factor though, the O(1) random access ram model gets you pretty far and after that you're probably interested in optimizing for some specific data size anyways.
I agree you don't often care about this scaling factor though, the O(1) random access ram model gets you pretty far and after that you're probably interested in optimizing for some specific data size anyways.