Sorting doubly linked list in c

Question

I want to keep a linked list in sorted order when inserting elements (about 200000 elements in the list), which algorithm can you recommend? I made a simple implementation using insertion sort, but its performance is very very bad (a lot of CPU usage).

Thanks for your help.

I did some comparison between merge sort and insertion sort but it seems that insertion sort has better performance, I am a bit confused by this result. Can you tell me what's wrong and if there is a better algorithm?

My code (for simplicity, I omitted the prev node in the node struct):

struct node {
    int number;
    struct node *next;
};

Insertion sort :

void insert_node(int value) {
    struct node *new_node = NULL;
    struct node *cur_node = NULL;
    struct node *last_node = NULL;
    int found; /* 1 means found a place to insert the new node in, 0 means not*/


    new_node = (struct node *)malloc(sizeof(struct node *));
    if(new_node == NULL) {
        printf("memory problem\n");
    }
    new_node->number = value;
    /* If the first element */
    if (head == NULL) {
        new_node->next = NULL;
        head = new_node;
    } 

    else if (new_node->number < head->number) {
        new_node->next = head;
        head = new_node;    
    } 

    else {
        cur_node = head;
        found = 0;
        while (( cur_node != NULL ) && ( found == 0 )) {
            if( new_node->number < cur_node->number )
            {
                found = 1;
            }
            else
            {
                last_node = cur_node;
                cur_node = cur_node->next;
            }
        }
    /* We got the right place to insert our node */
    if( found == 1 )
    {
        new_node->next = cur_node; 
    }
    /* Insert at the tail of the list */
    else
    {
        last_node->next = new_node;
        new_node->next = NULL;
    }           
}

Merge Sort :

/* add a node to the linked list */
struct node *addnode(int number, struct node *next) {
    struct node *tnode;

    tnode = (struct node*)malloc(sizeof(*tnode));

    if(tnode != NULL) {
        tnode->number = number;
        tnode->next = next;
    }

    return tnode;
}

/* perform merge sort on the linked list */
struct node *merge_sort(struct node *head) {
    struct node *head_one;
    struct node *head_two;

    if((head == NULL) || (head->next == NULL))
        return head;

    head_one = head;
    head_two = head->next;
    while((head_two != NULL) && (head_two->next != NULL)) {
        head = head->next;
        head_two = head->next->next;
    }
    head_two = head->next;
    head->next = NULL;

    return merge(merge_sort(head_one), merge_sort(head_two));
}

/* merge the lists.. */
struct node *merge(struct node *head_one, struct node *head_two) {
    struct node *head_three;

    if(head_one == NULL)
        return head_two;

    if(head_two == NULL)
        return head_one;

    if(head_one->number < head_two->number) {
        head_three = head_one;
        head_three->next = merge(head_one->next, head_two);
    } else {
        head_three = head_two;
        head_three->next = merge(head_one, head_two->next);
    }

    return head_three;
}

Answer 1

To insert elements in a linked list, the precondition that it is sorted does not help! There is no algorithm to help.

You might want to consider another structure for your elements. Depending on your situation a simple heap or a binary search tree might serve you well.

If you want to insert a lot of elements into a large sorted linked list you can sort them and then do a very fast merge O(N).