I’ve been mentioning memory and the cache a lot, because proper cache utilization really is a critical to good performance. This time we’ll look at cache pressure – a term that refers to overworking the memory cache with too many or wasteful memory accesses. Basically putting pressure on the memory cache means you’re wasting time accessing more memory than you need to. The main cause is inefficient data access, often by using data structures that are too large, or too sparse reducing any benefit from memory locality.
