In computer science, locality of reference, also known as the principle of locality, is the tendency of a processor to access the same set of memory locations repetitively over a short period of time. There are two basic types of reference locality – temporal and spatial locality. Temporal locality refers to the reuse of specific data and/or resources within a relatively small time duration. Spatial locality (also termed data locality) refers to the use of data elements within relatively close storage locations. Sequential locality, a special case of spatial locality, occurs when data elements are arranged and accessed linearly, such as traversing the elements in a one-dimensional array.

Locality is a type of predictable behavior that occurs in computer systems. Systems which exhibit strong locality of reference are good candidates for performance optimization through the use of techniques such as the caching, prefetching for memory and advanced branch predictors of a processor core.

There are several different types of locality of reference:

In order to benefit from temporal and spatial locality, which occur frequently, most of the information storage systems are hierarchical. Equidistant locality is usually supported by a processor's diverse nontrivial increment instructions. For branch locality, the contemporary processors have sophisticated branch predictors, and on the basis of this prediction the memory manager of the processor tries to collect and preprocess the data of plausible alternatives.

There are several reasons for locality. These reasons are either goals to achieve or circumstances to accept, depending on the aspect. The reasons below are not disjoint; in fact, the list below goes from the most general case to special cases:

If most of the time the substantial portion of the references aggregate into clusters, and if the shape of this system of clusters can be well predicted, then it can be used for performance optimization. There are several ways to benefit from locality using optimization techniques. Common techniques are:

Hierarchical memory is a hardware optimization that takes the benefits of spatial and temporal locality and can be used on several levels of the memory hierarchy. Paging obviously benefits from temporal and spatial locality. A cache is a simple example of exploiting temporal locality, because it is a specially designed, faster but smaller memory area, generally used to keep recently referenced data and data near recently referenced data, which can lead to potential performance increases.

Data elements in a cache do not necessarily correspond to data elements that are spatially close in the main memory; however, data elements are brought into cache one cache line at a time. This means that spatial locality is again important: if one element is referenced, a few neighboring elements will also be brought into cache. Finally, temporal locality plays a role on the lowest level, since results that are referenced very closely together can be kept in the machine registers. Some programming languages (such as C) allow the programmer to suggest that certain variables be kept in registers.