Patent ID: 7216203

Claim:
A method for reading ahead data pages from a network based file system, said method comprising: determining whether a number of available data pages resident to a client node satisfies a defined condition associated with a first value; initiating a read-ahead operation for a second value of data pages from said network based file system provided said number of available data pages satisfies said defined condition; receiving said second value of data pages from said network based file system for providing to said an application operating on the client node; and adding said second value of data pages to said number of available data pages resident to said client node, wherein said second value of data pages can be fetched from said network based file system before the application operating on said client node consumes said first value of data pages and wherein said read-ahead operation for the second value of data pages is initiated upon serving a data page of the number of available data pages to the application operating on the client node.