I discussed this method a little more in a blog post (https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2020/reducing-search-indexing-latency-to-

I discussed this method a little more in a blog post (https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2020/reducing-search-indexing-latency-to-one-second https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...), if you are trying to get an intuition here: > we only allocate one pointer for every level of the skip list. In a typical skip list, a node will have a value, a pointer to the next largest element in the list and a pointer to the lower level of the skip list. This means that a new value allocated into the second level will require the space for two values and four pointers. We avoid this by always allocating skip list towers contiguously. Each level K pointer will only point to other level K pointers, so to extract the value associated with a level K pointer P, you read the value at P - K. Once you reach a node with a value greater than the one you are searching for, you go back to the previous node, and descend a level by simply subtracting one from the pointer. This lets us allocate a value into the second level by just consuming the space for the value and two pointers. It also reduces the amount of time we need to spend chasing pointers, because a pointer into a tower is likely to be on the same cache line as the lower pointers in that tower.