I've seen about 5% variability in compile times, and various simple
tests that use a "medium" amount of memory, on various x86 systems over
the years. Often there are two peaks on the time graph -- n seconds,
and n-5% seconds.
Once a program has started "slow", it stays slow while it runs.
This is really unfortunate for games, because I've written games & demos
where the framerate is sometimes 5% lower than expected, and the
framerate stays consistently lower.
I've always assumed it was L2 cache issues or similar. I don't know if
there's a practical way to fix the problem, or if modern chipsets don't
have this problem.
-- Jamie
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