On Mon, 28 Sep 1998 23:30:18 -0500, Doug Ledford <dledford@dialnet.net>
said:
>> Start it running overnight, if it's still running when you wake up, your
>> memory's likely to be ok.
> No, no, and NO! If you want to test your RAM, you can't run some test that
> is CPU power limited. You'll never access your RAM here faster than the CPU
> can compile the kernel
Actually, gcc has such a large working set that it turns out to be a
very good test indeed at least for cache memory. On a 166MHz alpha UDB,
anything which fits into L1 cache absolutely flies, but kernel compiles
take about 4 times as long as on my 486-DX100 simply due the the UDB's
crippled L2 cache size and off-CPU memory bandwidth. Unless you have a
massive L1 cache like the new 21264s have, gcc speed is quite likely to
be influenced as much by L2 memory performance as by raw CPU speed.
--Stephen
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