Vmtouch – The Virtual Memory Toucher

A related question.

How can I preload a binary (for example a browser) in the background (without noticeable extra cost), so that when I start it, it opens immediately? Note that a binary may open shared-object files indirectly. It may even open data files.

I suppose a solution would need to run the binary while capturing system calls, so that it can learn (and predict) what files a binary will need in future invocations.

I've been using this for a few years to cache basically the whole of a USB drive after booting from it.

It helps make up for the slow read speed of many cheap flash drives by caching everything before a user even sits down to use it.(I run a programming contest so we set the computers up and boot them before hand, plenty of time for vmtouch to do its job)

Looks very cool... simple unix-style API!