pipe-test is a very stable workload, and is thus quite sensitive to the
associativity of the CPU cache. Even killing the task and repeating the
same test isnt enough to get rid of the systematic skew that this can
cause. I've seen divergence of up to 10% in pipe-test. One way to test
it is to run pipe-test, then to stop it, then to "ssh localhost" (this
in itself uses up a couple of pipe objects and file objects and changes
the cache layout picture), then run pipe-test again, then again "ssh
localhost", etc. Via this trick one can often see cache-layout
artifacts. How much 'skew' does pipe-test have on your system if you try
this manually?
Ingo
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