Pre-fetching of pages prior to a hard page fault sequence

In a computer system, a method for automatically detecting a hard page fault scenario, the method comprising the computer-implemented steps of:

• detecting the start-up of an application program module;
• determining if a scenario file exists;
• if not, then running the application program module;
• if a scenario file exists, then pre-fetching the pages in the scenario file into RAM and running the application program module;
• and
• logging a plurality of soft page faults and hard page faults into memory.

In a computer system, a method for detecting a hard page fault scenario, the method comprising the computer-implemented steps of:

• detecting the start-up of an application program module;
• determining if a scenario file exists;
• if not, then running the application program module;
• if a scenario file exists, then pre-fetching the pages in the scenario file into RAM and running the application program module;
• logging a plurality of soft page faults and hard page faults into memory;
• and ending the hard page fault scenario when a Win32 hourglass cursor is replaced with a regular cursor.

A method for building a plurality of memory descriptor lists (MDLs) for mapping to physical memory a plurality of pages referenced in a scenario file, the method comprising the steps of:

• determining whether each page referenced in the scenario file is already resident in physical memory and, if so, then discarding these pages from consideration;
• for all pages not resident in physical memory, determining whether the file offsets for each pair of consecutive pages is below a predetermined level;
• if so, then adding the pages to the MDL;
• and
• if the pages are not consecutive, plugging the gap between the pages by inserting a required number of references to one physical dummy page into the MDL.