On Sat, 15 May 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
<snips>
> Me neither, so far as linux is concerned.
>
> I did find that ReCache "worked" in the sense of at least making things
> no worse on a wide selection of systems running Win 9x & NT. It had least
> effect on systems which had minimal physical memory, and most effect on
> systems with lots of memory & high clock rate multipliers. e.g. on my
> PII-333 system (96 MB, NT WS 4.0) on a 256K FFT a "random" start of
> Prime95 gets an iteration time somewhere between 0.190 & 0.195 - towards
> the high end if Prime95 is started automatically by means of a shortcut
> in the "Startup" folder - whereas using ReCache I get 0.188 _consistently_.
>
> If you find ReCache doesn't work for you - even on a Windoze machine -
> then I'm sorry, but you do have the option not to use it!
This really sounds like it's a result of Intel's policy of making their
chipsets as cheap as possible.
It's a well known problem that several of the widely used Intel chipsets
can't cache memory above 64MB.
What isn't so well known is that this makes a real difference on Windows,
since Windows uses memory from the high addresses first, so the first
programs to be started ends up in uncacheable memory.
This is why it's sometimes possible to see machine performance drop when
you add more memory.
I suspect the real reason why ReCache makes prime95 faster is that it uses
up all the non cacheable memory, then loads prime85 in chacheable.
This will also be the reason for the difference on Linux, since the VM
model is completely different, and Linux specifically works around some of
the stupidities of the chipsets.
--
Henrik Olsen, Dawn Solutions I/S URL=http://www.iaeste.dk/~henrik/
`Can you count, Banjo?' He looked smug. `Yes, miss. On m'fingers, miss.'
`So you can count up to ...?' Susan prompted.
`Thirteen, miss,' said Banjo proudly. Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
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