Summary: A Study of Integrated Prefetching and Caching Strategies
Pei Cao 3 Edward W. Felten 3 Anna R. Karlin y Kai Li 3
Abstract
Prefetching and caching are effective techniques for improv­
ing the performance of file systems, but they have not been
studied in an integrated fashion. This paper proposes four
properties that optimal integrated strategies for prefetch­
ing and caching must satisfy, and then presents and studies
two such integrated strategies, called aggressive and conser­
vative. We prove that the performance of the conservative
approach is within a factor of two of optimal and that the
performance of the aggressive strategy is a factor signifi­
cantly less than twice that of the optimal case. We have
evaluated these two approaches by trace­driven simulation
with a collection of file access traces. Our results show that
the two integrated prefetching and caching strategies are in­
deed close to optimal and that these strategies can reduce
the running time of applications by up to 50%.
1 Introduction
Prefetching and caching are two known approaches for im­

Source: Anderson, Richard - Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington at Seattle
Felten, Edward W. - Department of Computer Science, Princeton University

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences