How Soon is Now? Preloading Images for Virtual Disks with ThinkAhead
summary
Trace analysis of ~160,000 image loads finds lazy loading causes 40% of slow I/Os (>1s), so ThinkAhead preloads blocks using score-based block selection (counts, avg/min access time reordered for density), groups traces by PCC-centroids, and covers cold cases with zero-shot via similar images plus genetic algorithm tuning of weights per bandwidth bin. A prototype and cluster evaluation show up to 7.27× higher data-block hit rate, up to 98.7% tail wait reduction, and 5.3× fewer slow I/Os in production compared to lazy loading.
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