Firefox™ Tutor - Firefox Help and Tips » Prefetch Myth
"Ed Bott, from Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise, explains in detail the beginnings of the “/prefetch:1″ myth and conclusively dis-counts it’s credibility as an effective tweak.
The popular beleif that adding “/prefetch:1″ to the end of the “Target” field on your program shortcuts will speed the loading of that program has gained a lot of momentum since it’s beginnings, which were based completely on a few assumptions. The momentum can be seen both in the approximately 10,000 web pages that claim this myth to be true (many of which are specifically intended to tell Firefox users how to speed up their browser), and in the opinion of Ryan Myers, a developer on Microsoft’s Windows Client Performance Team; “I suspect that the ‘add /prefetch:1 to make rocket go now’ urban legend will never die, though. I know that at least one major company ships products with it in their shortcuts, without ever asking us… just for good measure, I guess.”
Prefetching of Windows applications works by Windows temporarily saving some of the information required to load the application in a special “Prefetch” folder, so that the next time the program runs, Windows can start it faster. When someone observed that Windows Media Player (installed by default in Windows XP) had the switch /prefetch:1 at the end of it’s shortcut target, they assumed that
1. This meant the WMP was being instructed to use Application Prefetch, and
2. That this could be done with any program.
Application Prefetching is an option in Windows that is turned on by default (which would make all applications prefetch). So what doesn’t make sense is that they are saying that adding /prefetch:1 to try to tell the application to use Application Prefetch, is supposed to speed up the loading of an application that is already using Application Prefetch in the first place.
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The popular beleif that adding “/prefetch:1″ to the end of the “Target” field on your program shortcuts will speed the loading of that program has gained a lot of momentum since it’s beginnings, which were based completely on a few assumptions. The momentum can be seen both in the approximately 10,000 web pages that claim this myth to be true (many of which are specifically intended to tell Firefox users how to speed up their browser), and in the opinion of Ryan Myers, a developer on Microsoft’s Windows Client Performance Team; “I suspect that the ‘add /prefetch:1 to make rocket go now’ urban legend will never die, though. I know that at least one major company ships products with it in their shortcuts, without ever asking us… just for good measure, I guess.”
Prefetching of Windows applications works by Windows temporarily saving some of the information required to load the application in a special “Prefetch” folder, so that the next time the program runs, Windows can start it faster. When someone observed that Windows Media Player (installed by default in Windows XP) had the switch /prefetch:1 at the end of it’s shortcut target, they assumed that
1. This meant the WMP was being instructed to use Application Prefetch, and
2. That this could be done with any program.
Application Prefetching is an option in Windows that is turned on by default (which would make all applications prefetch). So what doesn’t make sense is that they are saying that adding /prefetch:1 to try to tell the application to use Application Prefetch, is supposed to speed up the loading of an application that is already using Application Prefetch in the first place.
Read rest of article here...
posted by OGRastamon at 7:54 PM
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