Time penalty for non-alignment on VAX/780

[Radford Neal]

RE: The discussion of whether C ought to pad structures to align data
    and the subsequent discussion of how much this gets you on a VAX.

There's nothing like actual data on a question like this. I ran the following
quick test program on a VAX 11/780 (Berkeley 4.2 C compiler):

#include <stdio.h>

main(argc,argv)
  int argc;
  char **argv;
{ int a[2]; register int *p;
  int n; int o; int rw; register int x;
  n = atoi(*++argv); o = atoi(*++argv); rw = **++argv;
  p = (int*)((int)&a[0]+o);
  if (rw=='r')
  { while (n>0)
    { *p = 0; *p = 0; *p = 0; *p = 0; *p = 0;
      *p = 0; *p = 0; *p = 0; *p = 0; *p = 0;
      n -= 1;
    }
  }
  else
  { while (n>0)
    { x = *p; x = *p; x = *p; x = *p; x = *p;
      x = *p; x = *p; x = *p; x = *p; x = *p;
      n -= 1;
    }
  }
}

The results are as follows:

% time aligntime 100000 0 r
        2.1 real         1.8 user         0.0 sys
% time aligntime 100000 1 r
        5.3 real         3.6 user         0.0 sys
% time aligntime 100000 2 r
        5.1 real         3.6 user         0.0 sys
% time aligntime 100000 3 r
        5.7 real         3.7 user         0.1 sys
% time aligntime 100000 4 r
        1.9 real         1.5 user         0.0 sys

% time aligntime 100000 0 w
        1.3 real         1.1 user         0.0 sys
% time aligntime 100000 1 w
        3.2 real         2.7 user         0.0 sys
% time aligntime 100000 2 w
        5.5 real         2.9 user         0.0 sys
% time aligntime 100000 3 w
        3.0 real         2.6 user         0.0 sys
% time aligntime 100000 4 w
        1.5 real         1.2 user         0.0 sys

Conclusion: Alignment of longwords on a mod 4 boundary gets you better
than a factor of two speed-up on both reads and writes. Alignment at 
a mod 8 boundary is not significant.

This is a bit worse than I would expect. Does the 780's microcode fetch
non-aligned longwords a byte at a time from cache? Note that the 
64-bit data path to main memory is not relevant, only cache accesses,
for this test.

      Radford Neal
      The University of Calgary