Paralfetch: Fast Application Launch on Personal Computing/Communication Devices

Abstract

Paralfetch speeds up application launches on personal computing/communication devices, by means of: 1) accurate collection of launch-related disk read requests, 2) pre-scheduling of these requests to improve I/O throughput during prefetching, and 3) overlapping application execution with disk prefetching for hiding disk access time from the execution of the application. We implemented Paralfetch under Linux kernels on a desktop/laptop PC, a Raspberry Pi 3 board, and an Android smartphone. Tests with popular applications show that Paralfetch significantly reduces application launch times on flash-based drives and hard disk drives, and it outperforms GSoC Prefetch [18] and FAST [21], which are representative application prefetchers available for Linux-based systems. © 1990-2012 IEEE.