Even this doesn't give you optimal locality. Objects in the same pool are closer than if they were randomly fragmented from a global allocator, but if you're ac

Even this doesn't give you optimal locality. Objects in the same pool are closer than if they were randomly fragmented from a global allocator, but if you're accessing them in the list order, you're not accessing adjacent addresses to take advantage of memory prefetch. If the pool is large, it may not even fit in the cache. When performance needs to be maximized, games switch to entity component systems and switch from arrays-of-structs to structs-of-arrays. This enables processing all objects as a vector, linearly from start to end, and often without needing to fetch any irrelevant bytes that aren't processed in a given pass. This sometimes also helps utilize SIMD for data spanning more than one entity, which you can't do when using linked lists.