> You can simulate random access by using a stride great enough to avoid the cache.
I think a good pattern is to add a large number co-prime to 2^32 on every iteration. That guarantees you actually hit all cache entries, while picking a "round" number like 1024 underutilizes the cache severely, which is unfair if you were trying to simulate random performance.
edit: Actually, in this case it doesn't really matter since your values aren't expected to be in-cache anyway.
Thank you for that little trick. Even if it doesn't matter for this case I will remember it for later. I know I've read stuff like that before, but I haven't learned enough of that part of discrete math to really understand why (but it seems kind of intuitive).
As a coincidence I got "A Concrete Introduction to Higher Algebra" by Lindsay Childs in the mail today. The concrete part of the book is that he uses properties about integers to introduce and teach concepts about algebra (and then he goes on to polynomials and other stuff). So now I got no excuse to not know that stuff any longer :-).
I think a good pattern is to add a large number co-prime to 2^32 on every iteration. That guarantees you actually hit all cache entries, while picking a "round" number like 1024 underutilizes the cache severely, which is unfair if you were trying to simulate random performance.
edit: Actually, in this case it doesn't really matter since your values aren't expected to be in-cache anyway.