Abstract-~ -This paper describes the results of a large empirical study to measure the run-time behavior
of Quick sort by using various methods of computing the pivot element for medium to large sire randomly
generated integer data. The results of our study contradict the common notion that Quick sort gives best
performance if median of three scheme is used to compute the pivot element and array partitions having
< IO elements are sorted by using insertion sort. It was found that Quicksort performs best when median
of three scheme is used to decide the pivot element and arrays with 14 elements are hand sorted. Our
method gives an average speedup of >9% when compared to the method with a cutoff of IO and
sub-arrays with < IO elements insertion sorted for 1000 < N < 1.5 x IO”. Our study shows that advanced
hardware features allow for implementation of very fast codes for sorting small arrays. and usmg such
codes instead of insertion sort can lead to substantial improvements for Quicksort. as conjectured by
Sedgewick many years ago. Copyright Q 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd