Even though the abstract includes the word “iconic”, I recommend an article from Nature, Uniquely preserved gut contents illuminate trilobite palaeophysiology,

I read a pre-print of a paper, The origin and early evolution of arthropods,

I accumulated a quart jar of US coins, legal tender for all debts public and private.

I turned the coins into paper currency at a “Coinstar” vending machine in a Safeway grocery store.

I decided to upgrade my OpenWrt One WiFi router.

I bought an OpenWrt One WiFi router from “Bipai Corp”, via AliExpress.

The list price was $89, I got it for $109 with shipping from China.

Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution

Richard Fortey, 2001, ISBN 978-0375706219

I decided my WRT3200ACM Linksys WiFi router is garbage. There’s something about the hardware that neither Linksys factory firmware, nor OpenWrt can deal with. It drops a lot of packets.

I bought an Asus AX6000 TUF gaming router, which is kind of embarrassing, but it supposedly works well with OpenWrt.

• Problem statement and some experimentation
• Explanation of the algorithm I came up with in 2021.
• Recursive merge sort algorithm to have something to compare
• Re-using linked lists while benchmarking
• Effect of address-ordered linked lists
• Traversing linked lists does not exhibit weird performance drops at specific list lengths
• Effect of size of linked list nodes tests whether virtual memory is somehow involved. It is not.
• Bottom-up implementation with linked lists from Wikipedia, has the same performance drops as my July 2021 algorithm
• Memory access effects: incrementing .Data values, or arbitrarily changing .Next pointers does not cause the performance drops, and looking for other anomalies
• Effect of garbage collection before preparing a new, unsorted, linked list
• The memory access patterns of recursive and wikipedia bottom up algorithms are identical, for linked lists that are powers-of-2 long. For other length linked lists, the memory access patterns are not.
• I wrote an iterative, explicit stack frame variation of recursive mergesort to try to get the same abrupt performance drops as the wikipedia bottom up algorithm. No joy.
• Recursive mergesort variations that explore specific differences between iterative and recursive algorithms do not impart any revelations.
• Counts of comparison operations finally reveals the cause of the performance drops.
• More counts of comparison operations, this time featuring pre-sorted and reverse-sorted initial linked lists

What happens if you compare the number of comparisons made by recursive and wikipedia bottom up algorithms if the initial list is pre-sorted (low data value to high data value) or reverse sorted (high data value to low).