Re:compilation times without a cache? (Score 1)

L2 is turned on in the BIOS. The kernel can use it, but it doesn't. I don't believe that Celeron /northwood chip, in fact/ can be as slow @3000, as Athlon XP at 1533 (1800+). I can believe in 20% performance drop, not 100%, sorry. Especially when L2 size is not reported properly by kernel... I tried to follow your suggestion of directly measuring performance drop for memory access. I run some old benchmark, but results are not easy to interpret. Performance drops at 32-64K for Cel, and 64-128K chunks for Athlon XP..... ;} It's not so easy, as it seems, maybe you know good cache benchmark for linux ?