title: Space complexity of C# sort on string lists
body: <p>I'm implementing a program to sort large files that maybe don't fit in memory. All files will be sorted by lines so I'm thinking in use a List to do it.</p>
  
  <p>I already calculated how many lines I can have in memory to split the files in smaller files, but I don't know how many space I need in memory to sort a List of N elements.</p>
  
  <p>The question is, knowing the maximum number of elements (strings of known size) and the available memory, how much space in memory will the List.Sort method will need?</p>