It seeks to increase the efficiency of disk utilization by "anticipating" future synchronous read operations.
This situation is detrimental to the throughput of synchronous reads, as it degenerates into a seeking workload.
[2] Anticipatory scheduling yields significant improvements in disk utilization for some workloads.
[3] In some situations the Apache web server may achieve up to 71% more throughput from using anticipatory scheduling.
[7] Since the anticipatory scheduler added maintenance overhead while not improving the workload coverage of the Linux kernel, it was deemed redundant.