[LUNI] Importance of L2 cache

[Steven Lembark]

-- jason1 at thelameserver.2y.net

> How important is L2 cache in the operation of various web services such
> as  http, ftp, irc, mail etc. I'm running a little server on a K6-2 500
> (128  cache) and was wondering if trying to track down the very elusive
> K6-3 (256  cache) would be of any real value for what I'm doing with this
> thing.

This cache is useful for re-used instructions. If your web
server is mainly serving static content it might help, since
the same portions of apache code are likely to be re-used
frequently. As you run a greater variety of code the value
of this cache goes down since the odds of finding a piece
of leftover cache goes down.

It's worth a try but upping your main memory to the point
of not swapping and adding either tmpfs or a ramdrive for
frequently accessed files might give you a better speedup.
Using high-speed SCSI drives is another speedup since HTML
tends to be bursty on i/o and the high-speed disks can
squirt out a page at nearly full speed. If disk I/O is a
problem you might also look into using LVM w/ a striped
file system to average out the disk load.

--
Steven Lembark                               2930 W. Palmer
Workhorse Computing                       Chicago, IL 60647
                                            +1 800 762 1582