Pointer Chasing

overview

Summary

Pointer chasing is the process of following chains of memory references (pointers) where each load reveals the address of the next load. It occurs in pointer-rich data structures like linked lists, trees, graphs, and hash tables with chaining. Because each step depends on the result of the previous memory access, pointer chasing is often limited by memory latency, reduces spatial locality, and is hard for hardware prefetchers to predict—making it a common performance bottleneck and a useful microbenchmark for memory systems.