[Solved]: Why does quicksort work well with virtual memory?

The hardware feature on modern computers that has the most drastic effect on the performance of algorithms is paging. Quicksort actually does not perform badly in a virtual memory situation (see [2]) because it has two slowly changing “localities” around the scanning pointers. In some situations, it will be wise to minimize page faults by performing the extra processing necessary to split the array into many partitions (instead of only two) on the first partitioning stage. Of course, the programs should be changed so that small subfiles are “insertionsorted” as they are encountered, because otherwise the last scan over the whole file will involve unnecessary page faults. Many internal sorting methods do not work well at all under paging, but Quicksort can be adapted to run quite efficiently.

The reference [2] cited there for further details is:

• B.S., Gustavson, F.G., and Mankin, E. “Sorting in a paging environment.” Comm. ACM 13, 8 (Aug. 1970), 483-494.

As it was suggested in the other answer, in more modern terms, the same property is phrased as quicksort having good cache locality; this is said for example in the 1994 paper “AlphaSort: A RISC Machine Sort” by Nyberg et al.; summary; the full text of this is found for example in Readings in Database Systems by Hellerstein and Stonebraker.