Hi guys, I was wondering if any of you could explain this performance for me: www.plflib.org/colony.htm#benchmarks
(full disclosure, this is my website and benchmarks - I just don't under the std::list results I'm getting at the moment)
If you look at the iteration performance graphs, you'll see that std::list under gcc (and MSVC, from further testing) has /really good/ forward-iteration performance for under 1000 elements (fewer elements for larger datatypes). Why is this. Everything I know about std::list's (non-contiguous memory allocation, cache effect) implementation tells me it should have terrible iteration performance. But for under 1000 elements it's often better than std::deque?
Benchmarking is done with templates, so there's no different code between std::deque and std::list (with the exception of std::list using push_front rather than push_back, for these tests) - and subsequent changes to the benchmark code have made no difference to the restuls.
Anyway, if anyone here is a GCC developer and has an understanding of why this happens, I'd be appreciative.
Cheers, matt
