The 64-Byte Grid Your Data Lives On

You write a struct with three fields. A char, a double, another char. Ten bytes of data. sizeof returns 24. Fourteen bytes appeared out of nowhere. To understand where they came from, you need to see the grid your data lives on — and the two opposing forces that grid creates. Cache lines and the hardware grid Your memory is not a flat sea of bytes. The hardware divides it into 64-byte blocks called cache lines. ...

March 20, 2026 · 9 min · Gracjan Olbinski