US Patent 7529891 Balanced prefetching exploiting structured data

Balanced prefetching automatically balances the benefits of prefetching data that has not been accessed recently against the benefits of caching recently accessed data, and can be applied to most types of structured data without needing application-specific details or hints. Balanced prefetching is performed in applications in a computer system, such as storage-centric applications, including file systems and databases. Balanced prefetching exploits the structure of the data being prefetched, providing superior application throughput. For a fixed amount of memory, it is automatically and dynamically determined how much memory should be devoted to prefetching.