You really need to measure, because this will depend on your workload, how fast your implementation is relative to the cost of a miss, what the ratio of "likely to never be requested again" to potentially long-lived objects are, etc.
[ ][ ][I][ ][ ][H][ ][ ]
^^^^^^^^
`these items move right
[ ][ ][H][ ][I][ ][ ][ ]
^^^^ ^^^^^^^ ^- this item moves to the top (left most slot)
| `--- these items move right
` these items move right
> If we think about doing it in hardware, like for each set of a set-associative L1 or L2 cache, it's a hindrance.
I don't see why I would think about doing it in hardware.
https://gist.github.com/vidarh/b72615c16673cb38630cab5148190...
You'll note it avoids a bunch of conditionals in add_to_head, remove_node and evict because the wraparound happens automatically and the next/prev pointers are never nil/None
I've not verified it matches the behaviour of yours exactly other than adding a handful of extra access calls and comparing the state.
If you're not familiar with Ruby, the one particularly dirty trick I'm using is that in Ruby you can define methods directly on a specific object, so by defining the method "@head.visited" to always return true, the eviction will just try to set it to false and move straight over it every run, cutting a conditional. You could do a ring without a dummy @head to but it makes the insertion/deletion logic more annoying.
It simplifies a lot of algorithms to be able to guarantee no null pointers. It's a very old trick. You trade a lot of conditionals and a risk of null pointers dereference for a smaller risk of non-termination (failure to check for a null pointer is always bad; failure to check for the end is only a problem if the end of the list is actually your termination condition).
You could do a ring with an array and modulus too, but then you end up copying the whole thing to open up slots to insert to maintain the property of your insertion point being separate from the hand.
That may or may not do worse, but likely to depend on cache size and implementation language.
What you'd almost certainly want in a production implementation anyway would in any case be to do away with constantly allocating nodes and just move them to a free list and reuse to avoid dynamic allocation overhead and garbage collection.