Flushing the disk cache

Posted on Thursday, 17th January, 2008 in Life

I’ve been looking for this over and over and over, until I had some inspiration today (thanks to Andew and Chris) .. this has one and only one sole purpose: safekeeping, so I don’t end up searching for it all over again …

To free pagecache:

# sync; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

To free 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

Once that is done, you’ll see the memory (usually RAM) freeing up.

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One Response to “Flushing the disk cache”

  1. On Tuesday, 5th February, 2008 at 02:46 Nick said:

    Any idea how this is done on pre 2.6.16 kernels? The feature was added on 2.6.16.

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