Comment by yencabulator

icache pressure was the bane of my optimization work around 2002. Mostly because it fluctuated unpredictably even from fairly small fairly faraway changes. The system got large enough, with a long enough hot code path that was very hot, that it was almost pointless to benchmark a subsystem in isolation. Simplistic attempts to make any subsystem faster typically made the whole system slower.

In general, whatever subsystem took the cache misses showed up as the slow part, and I owned the very first component in the pipeline... It was fun to compile time disable my component to demonstrate that nothing got faster, though.