Aha, so the contiguity of the actual memory pages must not be what is used for prefetching by the MMU, instead it is the contiguity of the virtual address space

Aha, so the contiguity of the actual memory pages must not be what is used for prefetching by the MMU, instead it is the contiguity of the virtual address space? I was thrown for a bit of a loop working through virtual vs actual memory addresses and how this works under the hood, but it makes more sense now. In that case then virtual_vec would be better than std::deque in terms of iterating over the contained data in order.