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Redhat Memory Question

list Mark Felder
Fri, 20 Mar 2015 08:12:21 -0500
Message-Id: <user-7512f8120c76@xymon.invalid>


On Thu, Mar 19, 2015, at 19:35, Root, Paul T wrote:
I have a script that frees up those buffers that make memory look full
          sync
        echo 3 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
        free -mt
Why would you do that? It is strongly recommended to not do that:

Use of this file can cause performance problems.  Since it discards cached
objects, it may cost a significant amount of I/O and CPU to recreate the
dropped objects, especially if they were under heavy use.  Because of this,
use outside of a testing or debugging environment is not recommended.

Page cache is not memory that is unavailable to other applications. If a
program requests more memory and there is not enough free, it will take
the page cache.