In order to prevent data thrashing and the resulting performance degradation, a computer system may maintain an application-layer cache space to more effectively use physical memory and, thus, significantly improve an application-memory hit ratio and reduce disk input-output operations. In particular, the computer system may maintain a managed memory cache that is separate from a page cache. The managed memory cache may be managed according to predefined caching rules that are separate from the caching rules in the operating system that are used to manage the page cache, and these caching rules may be application-aware. Subsequently, when data for an application is accessed, the computer system may prefetch the data and associated information from disk and store the information in the managed memory cache based on data correlations associated with the application.