title: What's the actual effect of successful unaligned accesses on x86?
body: <p>I always hear that unaligned accesses are bad because they will either cause runtime errors and crash the program or slow memory accesses down. However I can't find any actual data on how much they will slow things down.</p>
  
  <p>Suppose I'm on x86 and have some (yet unknown) share of unaligned accesses - what's the worst slowdown actually possible and how do I estimate it without eliminating all unaligned accesses and comparing run time of two versions of code?</p>