I sorted an ANSI encoded XML file with more than 6000 lines with UE v24.20 with default settings (configuration and sort settings) within a second. In other words the displayed refreshed immediately with showing the sorted lines after clicking on sort item.

I'm using UltraEdit already for more than 15 years. I have never seen a sort taking longer than a second on sorting less than 10000 lines. I think this is true also for nearly all other users of UltraEdit.

I suggest to use free Process Monitor of Sysinternals (Microsoft) to find out what makes the sort so slow on your machine.

I cannot help better without having the file to sort, your UltraEdit configuration, knowing the used sort options and the steps you execute resulting in the slow sort.

sort.exe is an open source application, see GNU core utilities and its documentation. It is ported from Linux to Windows and uses DLLs of Cygwin.

I could see with Total Commander with lister plugin fileinfo and with Process Monitor that sort.exe depends on following dynamic linked libraries:

• cyggcc_s-1.dll
  • cygwin1.dll
  • kernel32.dll
• cygwin1.dll
  • kernel32.dll
  • ntdll.dll
• cygintl-8.dll
  • cygwin1.dll
  • cygiconv-2.dll
  • kernel32.dll
• kernel32.dll

I have attached a ZIP file (later deleted) containing the Process Monitor log of a sort executed with 32-bit English UltraEdit v24.20.0.27 running on 64-bit Windows 7 on a several years old Dell Latitude E6500 with an SSD. The sorted file was a UTF-8 encoded XML file in C:\Temp with just 890 lines. The notebook had no connection to a network on running the sort in comparison to the sort I executed yesterday on a different computer which was connected to two networks. The sort took just 81.2 ms.

There is no access of WSHTCPIP.DLL, mswsock.dll, ntlanman.dll, davclnt.dll, davhlpr.dll recorded by Process Monitor on running the sort.

But what I can see are the attempts to access the Linux files /etc/fstab, /etc/nsswitch.conf, /etc/passwd, /etc/group, /home, /home/username. I have not analyzed if those file/directory access attempts are made by sort.exe or the Cygwin DLLs. But that does not really matter, it was just interesting to see like the attempts creating a file with a name starting with C:\Temp\--output=C.

I cannot see any real issue on execution of sort.exe by UltraEdit. I hope my Process Monitor log helps you to find out what slows down the sort on your machine.

There is also the help of sort.exe included in the (later deleted) attached ZIP file output on running the executable with --help as parameter.