-
Playing with your cache
Another possible titles could be “how to really slow down your computer” or “why caches are so important in computer architectures”. I started playing with turning my cache on and off last week using Linux because there are some situations in which you have to know why a piece of software is not working as expected. A possible problem could be the well known cache trashing, in which the contents of the cache is thrown away very often. Turning it down may give an answer if this is really the problem since now even running very slowly this variable is eliminated.
For example in my stage we had some tests showing that in certain scenarios a quad-core machine is much slower than an equivalent single or dual core. Next post I’ll show how to play with your cores, activating and deactivating them, so you may create your own programs and test them against a 1, 2, 3,… cores machine.
Also I think it’s a good exercise to students of computer science/engineering who are enrolled in courses as “computer architectures” and “operating systems”. For those, two good books: “Modern Operating Systems” by Tanenbaum and “Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach” by Hennessy and Patterson.