Fundamentals on Lorbic

Understanding CPU Caches in Go

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 22:15:00 +0530

When you’re building Go services that handle millions of operations per second, the hardware beneath your abstractions starts to matter. Specifically, the CPU cache hierarchy, and whether your data fits in it.

The Hardware Context: It’s Not Just “RAM”

Your server has 32GB or 64GB of RAM, but the CPU avoids touching it whenever possible. Instead, it works through a chain of caches:

Go Struct Field Alignment: How Memory Padding Wastes Your RAM

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0530

You write a struct to represent a database entity. Maybe 10 fields, maybe 20. What could possibly go wrong?

Nothing, according to your tests. But somewhere in production, your heap is 30% larger than it should be, your Garbage Collector is working overtime, and your L1 cache is not used properly. The reason? Invisible padding bytes silently inflating every instance of your struct.

This is the story of struct field alignment: a memory optimization that costs nothing to implement but can significantly improve performance.

Memory Mechanics In Go - Stack vs Heap

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:10:00 +0530

We often talk about “fast” code in terms of Big O notation or algorithmic complexity. But in systems programming languages like Go, “fast” is often a function of where your data lives in memory.

When optimizing for high throughput, efficient loops and database indexes are only part of the story. Eventually, you have to talk about the Stack and the Heap.

Understanding the difference isn’t just trivia. It is the difference between a service that hums along at 100k OPS with flat latency, and one that chokes on Garbage Collection (GC) pauses every few seconds.