Tue Jun 15 04:18:00 2010 from rss.slashdot.org

davecb writes "Think you've mastered the art of server performance? Think again. Poul-Henning Kamp, in an article at ACM Queue, finds an off-by-ten error in btrees, because they fail to take virtual memory into account. And he solves the problem in the open source 'Varnish' HTTP accelerator, for all of us to see and use." [Read More..]

As many around the net have pointed out, Knuth didn't really get it wrong. Kamp is talking about cache locality - the fact that accessing data in close relation can greatly increase speed. It is something that is rarely taught because it is hardware dependent. This is just a side effect of our current hardware design and while it might be 10x faster today (and for the last 20+ years) a change in hardware could mean it will be 10x slower tomorrow.