Niall,
On Mon Nov 10 2014 at 1:05:28 PM Niall Douglas
Sounds good. You'd get a graph of CPU cycle scaling to N looking like:
http://www.nedprod.com/programs/portable/nedtries/images/LogLogBitwise TreesScaling.png http://www.nedprod.com/programs/portable/nedtries/images/LogLogBitwiseTreesS...
http://www.nedprod.com/programs/portable/nedtries/images/LogLogRedBlac kTreesScaling.png http://www.nedprod.com/programs/portable/nedtries/images/LogLogRedBlackTrees...
http://www.nedprod.com/programs/portable/nedtries/images/LogLogHashTab leScaling.png http://www.nedprod.com/programs/portable/nedtries/images/LogLogHashTableScal...
For your situation you just sort, so a combined graph showing a comparative to other algorithms makes much more sense.
I've created an integer_sort graph here (click the graph tab at the bottom): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fUvIJQPaAbsUv54RGgNd-hWmJY996qvocaw-... If that's what you're looking for, I can create the equivalent graph for string_sort too. The crossover point of about 1000 elements is quite visible, and both std::sort and integer_sort have some minor parallelization inefficiency, but I see no surprises, and expect none for string_sort.