Posts tagged with Cache

I’ve always considered software prefetching to be something of a black art. There have been times in the past when I’ve looked at my code, noticed a load is causing problems and tried inserting one or more software prefetches to alleviate the issue. Mostly this hasn’t worked, although I’ve never been sure why. In fact, even when it has worked I haven’t been totally sure why it has, usually because it’s involved a lot of trial and error in trying out different options before I hit on improved performance.

Now it turns out that most of the time I was probably trying to prefetch the wrong things. Trying to prefetch linked data structures, which are those that involve pointer chasing (like a linked list),...