A Study of Integrated Prefetching and Caching Strategies

Prefetching and caching are eective techniques for improving the performance of le 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 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 signicantly less than twice that of the optimal case. We have evaluated these two approaches by trace-driven simulation with a collection of le 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%.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1995
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Pei Cao, Edward W. Felten, Anna R. Karlin, Kai Li
• Keywords: Caching, Hardware, Integrated Fashion, Integrated Strategies, SIGMETRICS 1995