Comment by 5a04fcd55b8

I may be missing something... Is bash exec()ing something in the loop? If so, caches will be the least of our concerns; there will be context switches, system calls, and even I/O, all orders of magnitude slower than even DRAM access. Otherwise, what is bash doing in the loop? When is bash ever CPU-bound?... in a library function call... that is also called by the other process?