Building a file cache
<p>I am looking for any information regarding the design and performance of a file cache. This is not for a website.</p>

<p>I'm working on a program that I may, potentially, want to maintain a small file cache to help speed up things (since it will be running on a mechanical disk, it may be possible to further increase performance by preloading the next file, and ensuring the CPU always has something to work on). </p>

<p>Would I just fire off a thread to load a file when I determine it's a good time, or are there more interesting / standard behaviors that might give better performance?</p>

<p>Many Thanks.</p>
