Fastest way to sort in Python

Question

What is the fastest way to sort an array of whole integers bigger than 0 and less than 100000 in Python? But not using the built in functions like sort.

Im looking at th

Answer 1

If you are interested in asymptotic time, then counting sort or radix sort provide good performance.

However, if you are interested in wall clock time you will need to compare performance between different algorithms using your particular data sets, as different algorithms perform differently with different datasets. In that case, its always worth trying quicksort:

def qsort(inlist):
    if inlist == []: 
        return []
    else:
        pivot = inlist[0]
        lesser = qsort([x for x in inlist[1:] if x < pivot])
        greater = qsort([x for x in inlist[1:] if x >= pivot])
        return lesser + [pivot] + greater

Source: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithms/Quicksort#Python