Redmine

I guess you have a space before Cy... in the issue subject. If you edit the issue, you should see it.
Then you have non-alphabetic characters, that's OK.
The Se in not the start of the subjet (starts with [#2614]... but the line is wrapped)
Then you have alphabetic characters in ascending order.

There is also a second bad sorting case in the same case study (see image in attachments): the order in the bottom part of the list is Y, X, W.
About the JPL comment on "space before Cy": if the system would let leading spaces in subject, then this should be another issue: leading spaces shall be trimmed for such a field...

Desc ordering, fist page

Desc ordering, last page

Oh, I did't even notice that it was on redmine.org!
There was no space before Cy... indeed but the C was not an ascii C (maybe some kind of cyrillic C?. I've replaced it with a regular C and it's now properly sorted.

the order in the bottom part of the list is Y, X, W.

That's OK for a reverse ordering

The page 1/164 shows A, C, E, H, j, N, s, ", which cannot be a "desc" ordering on the first page...

These ones had a leading space (I've checked it). I've removed the spaces and they are now properly sorted.

The same, for the last page

This is also fixed.

The sort is done by the database, so it should be OK in most cases. But yes, issue subjects should be stripped automatically by Redmine.