On: DOOM 3 BFG Technical Note [pdf]

[simias]

If your resource is read-mostly you'll probably still get better performances out of an array and clever/partial locking. That being said you can get correct performances out of linked lists using explicit prefetching while iterating.

[angersock → simias]

Ah, interesting. Do you know of any good examples showing prefetching for linked lists?

[simias → angersock]

The classic: http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/cpumemory.pdf

Look at 6.3.2 for software prefetching. Like the rest of the paper it's very x86 centric but most of the concepts apply to other architectures.