An Algorithm for Buffer Cache Management

This paper proposes an algorithm for buffer cache management with prefetching. The buffer cache contains two units, the main cache unit and prefetch unit. The sizes of both the units are fixed. The total sizes of both the units are a constant. Blocks are fetched in one block look ahead prefetch principle. The block placement and replacement policies are defined. The replacement strategy depends on the most recently accessed block and the defined miss counts of the blocks. FIFO algorithm is used for the prefetch unit. The proposed algorithm is compared with W² R algorithm for sequential and random input. For sequential input, the performance is comparable with that of W² R algorithm. For random input, the proposed algorithm performs better than W² R by 9%.