>threw up some threads to read ahead, then my user thread and my read
>ahead threads would thrash on trying to lock the buffer slots. So, I
>had the read ahead threads start at some distance into the table, and
>work toward the beginning. The user thread would do its own I/O until
>
>
Ah. The lightbulb went on. You want multiple outstanding I/O operations
in the case that table or index spans multiple physical disks.