The second experiment tried to study the influence of the cache size in the performance of the new mechanism. To do this experiment we have run all the benchmarks varying the cache size between 256Kbytes to 4Mbytes and the cleaning threshold used in all these experiments was 50%. The obtained results are drawn in Figure 5. In this graph, we will not present the results of simulator x5 as a curve with speedups of 6 would difficult the study of the graph.
Figure 5:
Influence of the cache size on the application performance.
The main observation is that there is nothing such as a perfect cache size for all benchmarks. It is clear that very large caches are no good as they take too many pages from the applications and they have to swap far too much.
Anyway, the important thing is that with reasonable cache sizes (around 1Mbyte) the performance of the applications is greatly improved due to the compressed cache.