Yeah, someone emailed me privately after they'd dug into this. They mentioned that "items[hashIndex]" was a significant source of cache misses. They used "perf

Yeah, someone emailed me privately after they'd dug into this. They mentioned that "items[hashIndex]" was a significant source of cache misses. They used "perf record -e cache-misses" and found it was the largest source of cache misses. They also found (by digging into the assembly) that the "bytes.Equal" line has some sort of source-line attribution issue.