Force Windows to cache executables without running them?
- by Josh Einstein
Is there a way to force Windows to pre-load certain EXE/DLL binaries into its prefetch/superfetch cache as if they had been executed? I have a particular application that loads pretty slowly on first run but if it's "warm" (recently executed) it starts pretty quickly. I'd like to prime the cache early in the background before the application is needed. But since it shows a UI, I'm looking for a way to do this silently. So simply launching the application it isn't ideal.
Thanks you in advance.
Prompted by David's suggestion in the comments, I wrote a PowerShell script to memory map the files, seek to the end, and close them. I haven't done any controlled tests yet and it could just be my imagination, but Sublime Text (the application in question) appeared to load much more quickly this time around and I haven't used it for several hours.