What is the fadvise / madvise equivalent on windows?

Question

On UNIX, I can, for example, tell the OS that mapping will be needed in the future using posix_fadvise(POSIX_FADV_WILLNEED) . Then it will read the data if so.

How do I report that access is for Windows?

Answer 1

In fact, as Anders usually suggested, there is no such method in the memory management functions available in Windows 7 and earlier .

There are 2 different ways to do something like this:

• Read data asynchronously with ReadFileEx . Then the data can still be in the file cache, if necessary later.
• Open the stream hint file with the FILE_FLAG_SEQUENTIAL_SCAN CreateFile attribute. Readahead may be automatically executed.

Answer 2

Starting with Windows 8, the PrefetchVirtualMemory function exists for this purpose.

Answer 3

You can pass FILE_FLAG_RANDOM_ACCESS or FILE_FLAG_SEQUENTIAL_SCAN to CreateFile ()