On faster application startup times: Cache stuffing, seek profiling, adaptive preloading

This paper presents data on current application start-up pessimizations (on-demand loading), relevant numbers on real-life harddisk seek times in a running system (measured from within the kernel), and shows and demonstrates possible improvements, both from userspace and in the kernel. On a side note, changes to the GNU linker are discussed which might help. Very preliminary experiments have already shown a four-fold speedup in starting FireFox from a cold cache.