The development of caches and caching is one of the most significant events in the history of computing. Virtually every modern CPU core from ultra-low power chips like the ARM Cortex-A5 to the highest-end Intel Core i7 use caches. Even higher-end microcontrollers often have small caches or offer them as options — the performance benefits are too significant to ignore, even in ultra low-power designs.

Memoization is a pretty well-known optimization technique which consists in “remembering” (i.e.: caching) the results of previous calls to a function, so that repeated calls with the same parameters are resolved without repeating the original computation.

Speed memory access by arranging data to take advantage of CPU caching.

nocache <I/O-heavy-command>

When optimizing memory access, and memory cache misses in particular, there are surprisingly few tools to help you. valgrind’s cachegrind tool is the closest one I’ve found. It gives you a lot of information on cache misses, but not necessarily in the form you need it.