To give an example, for traditional DES-based crypt(3) hashes only the first 8 characters of passwords are significant.
On the other hand, if your wordlist is sorted alphabetically, you do not need to bother about some wordlist entries being longer than the maximum supported password length for the hash type you’re cracking. Most wordlists that you may find on the Net are already sorted anyway. However, if you don’t list your candidate passwords in a reasonable order, it’d be better if you sort the wordlist alphabetically: with some hash types, John runs a bit faster if each candidate password it tries only differs from the previous one by a few characters. John does not sort entries in the wordlist since that would consume a lot of resources and would prevent you from making John try the candidate passwords in the order that you define (with more likely candidate passwords listed first).
