The reason seems to be the number of memory allocations. In order
to create the union of 100 lists we have 99 memory allocations.
The first needs the space for the first two lists, the second the
space for the first three lists, and so on.
We can reduce the number of allocations drastically (in many
cases to one) by leveraging the fact that many of the lists
were already sorted, non-overlapping and increasing, so that
we can simply concatenate them.
Andreas Huber
5197063ae3