In a method and apparatus for analyzing nodes of a Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA), an accessibility ranking, based on a DFA graph geometrical configuration, may be determined in order to determine cacheable portions of the DFA graph in order to reduce the number of external memory accesses. A walker process may be configured to walk the graph in a graph cache as well as main memory. The graph may be generated in a manner allowing each arc to include information if the node it is pointing to is stored in the graph cache or in main memory. The walker may use this information to determine whether or not to access the next arc in the graph cache or in main memory.