Fast Application Launch on Personal Computing - Communication Devices

Explore a groundbreaking approach to accelerating application launch times on personal computing and communication devices in this 18-minute conference talk from USENIX FAST '23. Discover Paralfetch, an innovative prefetcher designed to significantly reduce app launch times on flash-based drives. Learn about its three key components: accurate collection of launch-related disk read requests, pre-scheduling to improve I/O throughput during prefetching, and overlapping app execution with disk prefetching to hide disk access time. Examine the implementation of Paralfetch under Linux kernels on various devices, including desktop/laptop PCs, Raspberry Pi 3 boards, and Android smartphones. Compare its performance to existing app prefetchers like GSoC Prefetch and FAST, and understand how Paralfetch outperforms these alternatives in improving launch times for popular applications.