USENIX Association

We have previously shown that the patterns in which files are accessed offer information that can accurately predict upcoming file accesses. Most modern caches ignore these patterns, thereby failing to use information that enables significant reductions in I/O latency. While prefetching heuristics that expect sequential accesses are often effective methods to reduce I/O latency, they cannot be applied across files, because the abstraction of a file has no intrinsic concept of a successor. This limits the ability of modern file systems to prefetch. Here we presents our implementation of a predictive prefetching system, that makes use of file access patterns to reduce I/O latency