Profiling CPU cache in Linux

We can see how effectively cache is being used by using:

valgrind --tool=cachegrind ls

cachegrind is a tool for doing cache simulations and annotating your source line-by-line with the number of cache misses. In particular, it records:

• L1 instruction cache reads and misses
• L1 data cache reads and read misses, writes and write misses
• L2 unified cache reads and read misses, writes and writes misses