[jandrese]

Isn't the memory use itself a big problem on modern architectures? Or has it gotten better lately since CPU clocks have been relatively flat and memory clocks have been creeping up? The problem with the "allocate-and-discard" model of programming in the past is that it thrashes the hell out of the cache, which means lots of trips to main memory, which is slow on modern machines.

When you get an article like this going "holy shit, where have you been all my life circular buffers" it emphasizes the point. You wanna go fast you have to avoid invalidating cache as much as possible.