Breakpoint-Based Lightweight Prefetching to Improve Application Response
Haegeon Jeong, Jiwoong Won, Jaemyoun Lee, Kyungtae Kang, Junhee Ryu · 2015
Prefetching disk blocks reduces subsequent disk access times, allowing applications to load and run more quickly. Successful prefetching depends on the accuracy with which upcoming disk I/O can be predicted, and many techniques are not particularly accurate, while incurring significant memory and CPU overheads. A new lightweight prefetching technique for general applications performs off-line analysis of application source code, to identify disk access patterns, and then inserts breakpoints. At run time, these breakpoints trigger prefetching based on a log of disk accesses. Average reductions of 30% in launch times and 15% in loading times were observed in experiments.