Quarterdeck Corporation

Daniel S Spear

Philip B Gardner

Damon L Cusato

Laurance W Mayer

The present invention provides a method and apparatus for brokering memory resources. A memory broker cooperates with one or more memory servers and one or more memory clients. The memory servers obtain usable memory space and report the availability of such memory space to the memory broker. The memory clients request and receive memory allocations from the memory broker. In one embodiment of the invention, the memory broker interacts with memory servers that may be unable to guarantee the duration of availability of the memory space they provide. The memory broker can fulfill memory requests from memory clients using portions of memory distributed among multiple memory servers.

Method and apparatus for brokering memory resources

Efficiencies in searching and matching information in a computer system are achieved using embodiments of the invention. The invention can be used, for example, to build and utilize a dictionary of data for string replication compression. The data matching mechanism can also be applied to other situations where it is necessary to find a sequence of data in a data buffer (e.g. looking for a particular series of words, letters, or numbers in an online document). As a result of processing a current string using the data dictionary, it is possible to find a previously-processed dictionary string that has the greatest number of initial characters in common with the current string, and a location at which the current string can be inserted into the dictionary tree. A count field is used to improve the speed of searching for matched strings.

High speed data searching for information in a computer system

An improved method for loading a cache is described. The present invention monitors memory access to identify specific types of memory access, for example, requests to launch executable program code stored in a hard disk drive. The method maps the stored program code into a plurality of memory blocks. The memory block access during the launching of the executable program code is then profiled. When the computer remains idle for a predetermined time the profiling process is stopped. Alternatively, if the computer does not remain idle, for the predetermined time, the profiling process is stopped after a timeout period. The profile is then evaluated to identify the most frequently accessed memory blocks. A list of the most frequently accessed memory blocks is stored. The number of memory blocks stored in the list depends upon the size of the cache. The file access system is monitored to identify the next time that a profiled memory access process is initiated. When a profiled process is initiated, the list of the most frequently accessed memory blocks for that process is retrieved. These memory blocks are then pre-loaded into the software disk cache. Pre-loading the memory blocks into the disk cache avoids the long access times required to load pages from persistent storage devices, and thus significantly increases the execution speed of the application program. The present invention predictive cache system can reduce the time required to load executable programs from a hard disk by 40%.

Growing community of inventors

Beverly Hills, CA, United States of America

Daniel S Spear