Parallel prefetching and caching
Tracy Kimbrel · 1998
High-performance I/O systems depend on prefetching and caching to deliver good performance to applications. These two techniques have generally been considered in isolation, even though there are significant interactions between them: a block prefetched too early may cause a block that is needed soon to be evicted from the cache, thus reducing the effectiveness of the cache, while a block cached too long may reduce the effectiveness of prefetching by denying opportunities to the prefetcher. Using both analytical and experimental methods, we study the problem of integrated prefetching and caching for an I/O system with multiple disks. In a theoretical analysis, we consider algorithms for integrated prefetching and caching in a model abstracting relevant characteristics of file systems with multiple disk...