
119Standard Performance-Tuning Techniques
Naturally, prefetching consumes a lot more I/O bandwidth, memory, and CPU com-
pared to non-prefetched processing. A trade-off can be decided between these aspects and
the potential usability improvement.
We might base our decision on the likelihood of the prefetched data actually being used.
For example, a GUI that presents 100 possible data scenarios might not justify prefetching
all of them into memory, but if we only have a single possible data source then we might
be tempted to prefetch it.
Similarly, we might base our decision on the prefetching cost. For example, loading
an Excel data le can be v ...