read-ahead
A type of I/O request that prefetches a group of pages (an entire extent) into the buffer pool asynchronously, in anticipation that these pages will be needed soon. The linear read-ahead technique prefetches all the pages of one extent based on access patterns for pages in the preceding extent, and is part of all MariaDB versions starting with the InnoDB Plugin for MariaDB 5.1. The random read-ahead technique prefetches all the pages for an extent once a certain number of pages from the same extent are in the buffer pool. Random read-ahead is not part of MariaDB 5.5, but is re-introduced in MariaDB 5.6 under the control of the innodb-random-read-ahead configuration option.
See also buffer pool.
See also extent.
See also page.