I think the big picture here is that you are thinking it's difficult to notice cache misses and I think it isn't. Any time you are dereferencing pointers, worki

I think the big picture here is that you are thinking it's difficult to notice cache misses and I think it isn't. Any time you are dereferencing pointers, working with heap allocated objects, vtables etc you can assume they are cache misses. If they are in a hot loop they could matter. Really any time you aren't running through contiguous memory or dealing with stack variables you should assume there are lots of cache misses. Your entire program is full of cache misses until you specifically structure them out.