On Friday 26 October 2012 05:42:31 Jim Meyering wrote:
> Schwidom, Frank wrote:
> > In some situations sort wastes cpu-cycles of all available cpus.
> > 
> > $ sort --version
> > sort (GNU coreutils) 8.7
> > Packaged by Gentoo (8.7 (p1))
> 
> However, your version of sort is quite old and
> that bug was fixed almost two years ago:
> (from "NEWS")
> 
>     * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
> 
>     ** Bug fixes
> 
>       sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would
> busy-loop (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles
> to do no work.  I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
> [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
> 
> The latest release is coreutils-8.20.

and Gentoo has stabilized newer versions in the interim with 8.16 going stable 
most recently in Aug 2012.
-mike