But by increasing the number of pointers by log n, you reduce your cache hit ratio, do you not? It would seem that the only time this doesn't matter is when yo

But by increasing the number of pointers by log n, you reduce your cache hit ratio, do you not? It would seem that the only time this doesn't matter is when you've long since blown past the CPU cache and your RAM cache hit ratio is going to be in the <5% range, with almost every access to the data structure resulting in disk accesses.