You seem to be talking about something different than the skiplists and their effects on the cache. Unless you're building the actual chipsets, you don't get r

You seem to be talking about something different than the skiplists and their effects on the cache. Unless you're building the actual chipsets, you don't get really any say in the amount and style of caching that your skiplist code is running on. Skiplists end up with a ton of pointer chasing and hence dramatically increase the pressure on the memory cache. There's no real, profitable way around that fact. You might want to look at the non-block hashtable work that I pointed to previously for a lot of information (and the actual code (in Java) is up on SF.net so you can actually try it out for yourself).