Linux caches the disk reads. You can have it prove by copying huge data in and out of disk and check how the cache piles up. Linux normally writes data buffered in memory out to disk at a specified interval. This provides really good performance benefit.
Linux usually readjusts the free available RAM on cache/buffer with a LRU(Least recently Used) algorithm and application will never starve for memory -as kernel will take care of this dept. always - but when we see something very odd like 40GB + in cache and that too application is finding difficult to get needed share of RAM we can always do it manually. Probably Kernel is very busy or cache itself is too huge to do on the fly validation for LRU and hence application is behaving slow. I guess this feature is available from 2.6.16 onwards.
But there are certain cases where before flushing it off the RAM cache you would want to guarantee that everything is flushed to disk. If you type sync when logged in as root, it tells the OS to write all buffered data like superblock, inode, buffered read, and buffered write data to disk. This insures that nothing is sitting in RAM before you flush the cache.
We can always issue a sync after an operation such as copying a large file to insure that all the data is committed to disk. Conveniently, sync will block until the data is written giving you a guarantee that you're safe.
I have seen this issue in VMWARE hosts sometime back - VMware (ESXi4) looks for guest OS to let it (ESXi host) know when the guest is done using the memory so it will make it available it to another server – and it happens that guest does not release the cache (feature wise!! ) and host thinks that the memory is still in use. And what we see in the host is that - a huge piled up cache – BUT nothing is running in host ! And that’s a real FUN !!! So need to resort to the manual mechanism.
We MUST always use a ‘sync’ before using any of these.
To free only pagecache:
#sync; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
To free only dentries and inodes:
# sync; echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
To free pagecache, dentries and inodes:
#sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
I am sure this is a NOT an unsafe operation and will only free things that are completely unused. Dirty objects will always reside on RAM until written out to disk and are not freeable. If you run "sync" first to flush them out to disk, it should be able to free more memory.
Thanks/-
DEBU
Linux usually readjusts the free available RAM on cache/buffer with a LRU(Least recently Used) algorithm and application will never starve for memory -as kernel will take care of this dept. always - but when we see something very odd like 40GB + in cache and that too application is finding difficult to get needed share of RAM we can always do it manually. Probably Kernel is very busy or cache itself is too huge to do on the fly validation for LRU and hence application is behaving slow. I guess this feature is available from 2.6.16 onwards.
But there are certain cases where before flushing it off the RAM cache you would want to guarantee that everything is flushed to disk. If you type sync when logged in as root, it tells the OS to write all buffered data like superblock, inode, buffered read, and buffered write data to disk. This insures that nothing is sitting in RAM before you flush the cache.
We can always issue a sync after an operation such as copying a large file to insure that all the data is committed to disk. Conveniently, sync will block until the data is written giving you a guarantee that you're safe.
I have seen this issue in VMWARE hosts sometime back - VMware (ESXi4) looks for guest OS to let it (ESXi host) know when the guest is done using the memory so it will make it available it to another server – and it happens that guest does not release the cache (feature wise!! ) and host thinks that the memory is still in use. And what we see in the host is that - a huge piled up cache – BUT nothing is running in host ! And that’s a real FUN !!! So need to resort to the manual mechanism.
We MUST always use a ‘sync’ before using any of these.
To free only pagecache:
#sync; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
To free only dentries and inodes:
# sync; echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
To free pagecache, dentries and inodes:
#sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
I am sure this is a NOT an unsafe operation and will only free things that are completely unused. Dirty objects will always reside on RAM until written out to disk and are not freeable. If you run "sync" first to flush them out to disk, it should be able to free more memory.
Thanks/-
DEBU
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