One embodiment of the system disclosed herein facilitates reduction of latency associated with accessing content of a memory page that has been swapped out by a guest operating system in a virtualized computer system. During operation, a hypervisor detects an I/O write command issued by the guest operating system at a swap location within the guest operating system's swap file and records the swap location. The hypervisor then prefetches contents of a page stored at the swap location within the guest operating system's swap file into a prefetch cache in host machine memory. Subsequently, the hypervisor detects an I/O read command issued by the guest operating system at the swap location within the swap file. In response, the hypervisor provides contents of the page to the guest operating system from the prefetch cache, thereby avoiding accessing the guest operating system's swap file.