A Study of Integrated Prefetching and Caching Strategies

Abstract:

Prefetching and caching are effective techniques for improving 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 prefetching and caching must satisfy, and
then presents and studies two such integrated strategies, called
aggressive and conservative. We show 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
significantly less than twice that of the optimal case. We have
evaluated these two approaches by trace-driven simulation with a
collection of file access traces. Our results show that the two
integrated prefetching and caching strategies are indeed close to
optimal and that these strategies can reduce the running time of
applications by up to 50%.

This technical report has been published as

A Study of Integrated Prefetching and Caching Strategies. Pei
Cao, Edward W. Felten, Anna R. Karlin and Kai Li,
Proc. of 1995 ACM SIGMETRICS Conference
Best Paper award.