Resources

What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory

This paper demystifies the complexities of the memory subsystem on modern commodity hardware—laying out the evolution of memory, the rationale behind CPU caches, and the distinct roles of RAM, memory controllers, and cache hierarchies. It walks programmers through how caches—L1, L2, L3—and virtual memory operate, illustrates memory access latency with insightful diagrams, and delves into NUMA considerations. Crucially, it equips developers with practical strategies to write performant code by aligning data structures, leveraging locality, understanding concurrency impacts, and optimizing for cache behavior.