Effectiveness of String Cache?

I was wondering how effective the string cache. So I built
gmake from scratch with the '-p' option. It said that there were
44 strings in strcache. Of course it didn't say how effective this
cache was - that is how many times the cached strings were used.

I'm wondering if it's really worth the extra code to cache 44 strings.
Are there other programs that result in a much higher number of
strings in the cache?

Cordially,
Jon Forrest