performance of cache-intensive applications

Hi,

I am using an open-source application on ix86 to perform a task which is cache-intensive. When I run consecutive iterations of the task on a fixed input, the variance in timing of each iteration is extemely
high. Needless to say, the test machine is always non-occupied.

On every other OS I tried, Solaris, HPUX, FreeBSD and Tru64, the timing is very consistent between the iterations. My question is, are there known issues with L2 cache reuse in Linux kernel?

I can provide any necessary information for anyone interested in addressing this issue, but I purposely skipped most technical details in this post to keep it simple.

Thanks in advance.

Igor

CPU bound or I/O bound ? What kernel version ? IDE or SCSI ? vmstat ? Other details ?

Bye.