On the theme of "contiguous enables fast":

Fast Polymorphic Collections

by Joaquín M López Muñoz

From the article:

poly_collection behaves excellently and is virtually not affected by the size of the container. For n < 105, the differences in performance between poly_collection and a std::vector of std::unique_ptrs are due to worse virtual call branch prediction in the latter case; when n > 105, massive cache misses are added to the first degrading factor.