CACHE(8)

NAME
cache - cache parameters

SYNOPSIS
cache [ -L <line size> ] [ -M <len> ] [ -W <warmups> ] [ -N <repetitions> ]

DESCRIPTION
cache tries to determine the characteristics of the memory hierarchy. It attempts to determine the number of caches, the size of each cache, the line size for each cache, and the available memory parallelism at each level in the memory hierarchy. The largest amount of memory it will examine is len bytes.

cache first attempts to determine the number and size of caches by measuring the memory latency for various memory sizes. Once it has identified the various caches it then measures the latency, parallelism, and line size for each cache. Unfortunately, determining the cache size merely from latency is exceedingly difficult due to variations in cache replacement and prefetching strategies.

BUGS
cache is an experimental benchmark and is known to fail on many processors. In particular there are a large number of machines with weird caching behavior that confuse cache and prevent it from accurately determining the number and size of the various caches.

SEE ALSO
lmbench(8), line(8), tlb(8), par_mem(8).

AUTHOR
Carl Staelin and Larry McVoy

Comments, suggestions, and bug reports are always welcome.