Check out the discussion on reddit. Given an array of data, what is the slowest way to sum up the integers? Is it adding the numbers from left to right, adding them randomly, or doing something else? In this post, we are going to build a data access pattern from the ground up that sums numbers as slowly as possible by exploiting memory pitfalls. uint32_t* data = ...; // sequential data[0] + data[1] + data[2] + ... // random data[67] + data[69420] + data[42] + ... // the slowest data[A] + data[B] + data[C] + ... Spoiler: You can do >30% worse than a randomized access pattern.