> it's difficult to measure the indirect impact of things like memory locality — I have heard such factors blamed for poor performance much more often than I ha

> it's difficult to measure the indirect impact of things like memory locality — I have heard such factors blamed for poor performance much more often than I have seen such factors proven as responsible for poor performance. In general, I only look to such factors when I'm getting desperate. No thanks. Cache-related perf counters are easily measurable, but the impacts are so big you rarely need them.