Space complexity of C# sort on string lists
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I'm implementing a program to sort large files that maybe don't fit in memory. All files will be sorted by lines so I'm thinking in use a List<string> to do it.

I already calculated how many lines I can have in memory to split the files in smaller files, but I don't know how many space I need in memory to sort a List of N elements.

The question is, knowing the maximum number of elements (strings of known size) and the available memory, how much space in memory will the List.Sort method will need?


Thanks in advance.