One trick is to read the file into memory at application startup. All data is paged in, so it's hot and ready to go: no page faults. In the early 2000's, I work

One trick is to read the file into memory at application startup. All data is paged in, so it's hot and ready to go: no page faults. In the early 2000's, I worked on a near real time system that used memory mapped I/O. At app startup, several gigabytes were read into memory. It never blocked under normal circumstances (in production) since the systems were provisioned with enough memory.