We introduce a software/hardware scheme called the Field Array Compression Technique (FACT) which reduces cache misses caused by recursive data structures. Using a data layout transformation, data with temporal affinity are gathered in contiguous memory, where recursive pointer and integer fields are compressed. As a result, one cache-block can capture a greater amount of data with temporal affinity, especially pointers, thereby improving the prefetching effect. In addition, the compression enlarges the effective cache capacity. On a suite of pointer-intensive programs, FACT achieves a 41.6% average reduction in memory stall time and a 37.4% average increase in speed.