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CPU Cache
While there's a lot of discussion about CPU cores and clock speeds, I find that CPU cache often gets less attention. I'd like to understand more about its role and importance in cloud environments, do you consider it when order a server?
I'm curious about how CPU cache size impact the performance. Does a larger cache significantly improve performance for certain types of applications? Are there specific scenarios where cache size is a critical factor to consider?
Thank you!
Comments
The question translates to whether the PHP interpreter on the webserver runs the cgi-bin scripts faster with more cache.
No.
(answer based on mental inference from ass-pulled data sets)
Big CPU Cache helps in situations where frontend of CPU is doing heavy lifting.
You will notice a big improvement from big CPU cache in databases, http servers. You will see zero difference in video encoding or compilation.
Basically cache helps in unpredictable scenarios, because older data wont be evicted so quickly and theres a chance useful data is still in cache. If data isn't in cache we call that "cpu cache miss penalty".
If calculations are predictable data will be always in cache, even if cache is small, because prefetcher in CPU will do its job. You can easily predict what you gonna need to encode next frame of videos, but theres no way to know which records in database you gonna select or update. This is why you have difference.
Fun fact: In new Intel processors if you disable e-cores you will see improvement in database performance, because these cores wont eat cache that could be used by p-cores instead xD same things happen in some games, but difference is not that big as with databases.