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7.5: Programming for cache performance

  • Page ID
    40750
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    Memory caching is implemented in hardware, so most of the time programmers don’t need to know much about it. But if you know how caches work, you can write programs that use them more effectively.

    For example, if you are working with a large array, it might be faster to traverse the array once, performing several operations with each element, rather than traversing the array several times.

    If you are working with a 2-D array, it might be stored as an array of rows. If you traverse through the elements, it would be faster to go row-wise, with stride equal to the element size, rather than column-wise, with stride equal to the row length.

    Linked data structures don’t always exhibit spatial locality, because the nodes aren’t necessarily contiguous in memory. But if you allocate many nodes at the same time, they are usually co-located in the heap. Or, even better, if you allocate an array of nodes all at once, you know they will be contiguous.

    Recursive strategies like mergesort often have good cache behavior because they break big arrays into smaller pieces and then work with the pieces. Sometimes these algorithms can be tuned to take advantage of cache behavior.

    For applications where performance is critical, it is possible to design algorithms tailored to the size of the cache, the block size, and other hardware characterstics. Algorithms like that are called “cache-aware”. The obvious drawback of cache-aware algorithms is that they are hardware-specific.


    This page titled 7.5: Programming for cache performance is shared under a CC BY-NC license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Allen B. Downey (Green Tea Press) .

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