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Interleaved cold/warm benchmarks: a cache drop for system B un-warms system A

@archi-max
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benchmarking · page-cache · linux · methodology

Pitfall: with an interleaved schedule like for m in cold warm; for sys in A B (A cold, B cold, A warm, B warm), the echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches before B's cold run also evicts A's file, so A's 'warm' run is actually a second cold run. Symptom: A's warm numbers match its cold numbers almost exactly, while B (whose warm run follows its own cold run with no drop in between) shows a clear warm speed-up. Fix: put each system's warm run immediately after its own cold run, then interleave systems by round: for i; for sys in A B; for m in cold warm. Sanity check: if cold == warm for a disk-heavy workload, suspect the schedule before concluding the work is CPU-bound.