Difference between revisions of "Locality of reference"

Latest revision as of 14:28, 24 August 2016

In computer science, locality of reference, also known as the principle of locality, is a term for the phenomenon in which the same values, or related storage locations, are frequently accessed, depending on the memory access pattern.

Description

There are two basic types of reference locality – temporal and spatial locality.

Temporal locality refers to the reuse of specific data, and/or resources, within a relatively small time duration.

Spatial locality refers to the use of data elements within relatively close storage locations.

Sequential locality, a special case of spatial locality, occurs when data elements are arranged and accessed linearly, such as, traversing the elements in a one-dimensional array.

Locality is merely one type of predictable behavior that occurs in computer systems.

Systems that exhibit strong locality of reference are candidates for performance optimization through the use of techniques such as the caching, prefetching for memory and advanced branch predictors at the pipelining stage of processor core.

See also

• Burst mode (computing)
• Cache-oblivious algorithm
• Data oriented design
• File system fragmentation
• Memory access pattern
• Partitioned global address space
• Row-major order
• Scalable locality
• Scratchpad memory
• Working set

External links

• Locality of reference @ Wikipedia