Sounds like the Flyweight design pattern. Basically, if you have a lot of small objects that would take a lot of memory, then you just cache them all. The cano

Sounds like the Flyweight design pattern. Basically, if you have a lot of small objects that would take a lot of memory, then you just cache them all. The canonical use case is a word processor that needs one instance of a letter class for each letter in a document. That's a lot of letters, but there is also a lot of repetition. However, if you have several hundred letters `e', all of the same font face and size, then why not just use the same reference to that identical object and save a lot of space? (You improve your program's spatial locality quite a bit as well.)