And a good way to ruin cache hits is to use a garbage-collecting language. In reply to Aristotle:
The theory is (and I haven't profiled this myself, just passing on received wisdom) is that when the GC goes off to clear out old memory, it has to read it into the cache to do so. If the memory were released as soon as it were finished with, then the page could just be discarded as necessary. Of course, the effect on processor cache is just one factor, and it may be that good GC systems can make up for this in other ways, but I don't like them anyway. I much prefer deterministic release of resources.
I first heard of this theory from comments by Linus Torvalds, if you'll excuse the name dropping, and it seems to make sense to me. Of course it may be that the pages visited by the GC are pages that are going to be needed real soon. A good reminder that the first rule of optimisation is: don't, and the second is: do some profiling first.
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