An Adaptation of a Root Finding Method to Searching Ordered Disk Files Revisited an Extensive Simulation Has Been Carried out on Ibm at with Turbo Pascal

In the present report, Interpolation search, Fast search and Pegasus method are compared with respect to their performance in searching ordered disk files for several key distributions. The aim is to study the effect of the page capacity on searching performance. Cost metric is the number of page accesses and not key comparisons. Numerical results are illustrated and a new approximate formula is derived giving an estimate of the number of page accesses for the case of the Interpolation algorithm under uniform distributions. CR categories and subject descriptors: D.4.2, D.4.8, F.2.2, H.2.2. General terms: Algorithms, Experimentation, Performance. Additional key words and phrases: Interpolation search, Fast search, Pegasus method, root location methods, ordered and unindexed files, page capacity, searching performance.