Preloading and prebinding

The Prefetcher is a component of Microsoft Windows which was introduced in Windows XP. It is a component of the Session Manager Subsystem that can speed up the Windows boot process and shorten the amount of time it takes to start up programs. It accomplishes this by caching files that are needed by an application to RAM as the application is launched, thus consolidating disk reads and reducing disk seeks. This feature was covered by US patent 6,633,968.

Readahead is a system call of the Linux kernel that loads a file's contents into the page cache. This prefetches the file so that when it is subsequently accessed, its contents are read from the main memory (RAM) rather than from a hard disk drive (HDD), resulting in much lower file access latencies.