Sorting a terabyte of data in the late 1990s meant serious hardware, serious planning, and probably a serious budget approval process. Today you can do it on a workstation before lunch. I wanted to know how fast, so I wrote rustbucket to find out.

It’s a two-phase external sort implemented in Rust, built around io_uring, and named for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has spent time with either Rust or storage systems.