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This is fine and dandy, until your list becomes heavily fragmented. Suddenly traversing your list becomes a series of expensive cache misses.

So it's not 'faster', it depends very much on the use case - like any data structure.

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Does it actually matter that much in Java? In Java, a collection of objects is already a collection of pointers, so wouldn't we get a fair number of cache misses anyway? Or does the JVM have some cool mechanism to minimize those?

Some JVM implementations convert objects into value types if they are final POJOs e.g. Point with X/Y accessors, Azul does this I think, but most likely it won't work for list like structures.

With Java, and any other VM that doesn't specify an exact GC algorithm, it always depends.

IIRC the train algorithm used in some JVMs improves locality. Most GCs use a pointer-bump scheme anyways, leading to pretty good locality for objects that have been created together.

So yes, the JVM _may_ have some pretty cool mechanisms to minimize those. I would be also interested in G1s behavior and whether or not it improves locality somehow.

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