Precomputation in a Complex Object Environment

Caching certain results of computation has been shown to be an effective performance enhancement tool in the context of complex objects and rule-based systems [JHIN88, STONSO]. In this paper we establish certain analytic results about such caching. In particular we show that caching the identifiers of the constituent subobjects may prove useful when the set of subobjects of an object is represented procedurally. However, caching the values of the subobjects is often more effective. We also establish certain performance characteristics of a knapsack based algorithm which can be used to optimally decide which of the precomputed results to cache.