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.

(c)2000 Carl Staelin and Larry McVoy                 $Date$                                             CACHE(8)