[gane5h]

Going on a tangent here: this benchmark highlights the difficulty of sorting in general. Sorts are necessary for computing percentiles (such as the median.) In practical applications, an approximate algorithm such as t-digest should suffice. You can return results in seconds as opposed to "chest thumping" benchmarks to prove a point. :)

I wrote a post on this: http://www.silota.com/site-search-blog/approximate-median-co...

[sonoffett]

Perhaps I misunderstand your comment, but you actually don't need to sort to compute a median (see O(n) median of medians algorithm [1]).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_of_medians