Martin Fowler • 4/7/2026

Principles of Mechanical Sympathy

This article delves into the concept of mechanical sympathy, borrowed from racing and popularized by Martin Thompson, as a practice for creating software that efficiently leverages modern hardware. It covers key principles such as predictable memory access, awareness of cache lines and false sharing, the single-writer principle, and natural batching. These techniques are applied to optimize systems like AI inference servers and distributed data platforms, with insights from the author's experience in high-performance computing.

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#performance optimization #Mechanical Sympathy #Cache Lines