# Investigating L3 Cache Contention in Micro-Benchmarks and Larger Applications

DevFeed: [Investigating L3 Cache Contention in Micro-Benchmarks and Larger Applications](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-uncanny-valley-of-l3-cache-contention-30655.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://bad-concurrency.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-uncanny-valley-of-l3-cache.html>)

Author: Michael Barker (noreply@blogger.com)

Published: 2014-12-03T01:13:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Bad Concurrency](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/bad-concurrency.md>)

Topics: [Cache](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cache.md>), [Benchmark](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/benchmark.md>), [cpu](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cpu.md>), [Performance Testing](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/performance-testing.md>), [Concurrency](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/concurrency.md>)

Tags: [benchmarks](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/benchmarks.md>), [cache](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cache.md>), [cpu](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cpu.md>), [performance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/performance.md>), [performance-testing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/performance-testing.md>), [thread](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/thread.md>)

## AI overview

The article investigates why a LevelDB micro-benchmark reached about 400K operations per second while the same code could not sustain a 160K operations-per-second requirement in an end-to-end environment. It attributes the difference to shared L3 cache contention among concurrent threads in the larger application.

## Source excerpt

While preparing for my talk at QCon SF 2014, I wanted to investigate a theory around how micro-benchmarks are not a useful reflection of how software may behave when run as part of a larger application. Specifically due contention in the last-level cache (L3* in current Intel CPUs). Read more "