A Critical Comparison on Different Sorting Algorithm Performance

In Computer Science, Sorting is a very basic and important issue. This is most important because it increase the value to the data and makes easier to manage and modify a sorted data. But there are lots of algorithms to sort a data, which varies from the type of data to be sorted and amount of data to be sorted. Studies done on sorting algorithms are limited on theory and there are some comparisons done on less amount of data, but some sorting algorithms changes their behavior when amount of data is increased. In this article we have picked five popular algorithms (Bubble Sort, Insertion Sort, Merge Sort, Quick Sort, Selection Sort) and compare them on the basics of their performance on a predefined set of unsorted and sorted data of length 1000, 3000, 5000 and provide an overview on the performance. Comparisons are made on their performance or time consumed by each algorithm to process the sorted and unsorted data and represented them in form of tabular and graphs so we can have a proper conclusion. We have developed programs on C++ of every algorithm and print out the compile time of algorithm using C++ libraries. After performing more than 10 tests on every algorithm we found that the property of these algorithms changes drastically when we increase the amount of data, and the type of data unsorted and sorted in ascending or descending. Our goal is finding the right sorting algorithm for the right situation not every algorithm can stand all situation.