Who merges?

An optimized refcount scheme may take only a few bits per object, for most objects, so I was thinking one cache line might hold refcounts for a hundred objects. Also, a dirty cache line is way more expensive than a clean one (because it must be written back, and isn't a candidate for replacement until that's done) so I meant to concentrate the refcount churn, and segregate it from the (commonly) mostly-unchanging objects. This helps most where you have some semblance of locality. Unfortunately things like inode caches don't.

As always, there's no substitute for measuring, but you have to build it first.