How To: Clear cache from your RAM

[jampola]

So, Gnome Shell being Gnome Shell, I notice it likes to eat up a lot of RAM with it's cache. Cache is a great thing until it doesn't make way for more useful things.

Whilst I should make you aware that it's not necessarily a bad thing (since when something NEEDS to use the ram, it should clear the old Cache out) It sometimes doesn't work that way.

An dead easily solution is to clear up some data from your ram is to use an old and trusted command I use to clear my servers RAM after an mysql dump.

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sudo sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

And if you're like me and you leave your machine on for quite a number of days at a time, it might be best to add a cron job to take care of it daily. If you're not sure what cron is, take a quick read here http://tldp.org/LDP/lame/LAME/linux-admin-made-easy/using-cron.html

And here is a little before and after as an example:

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             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          7908       --->6288<---       1619          0        206       4859
-/+ buffers/cache:       1222       6686
Swap:         8096          0       8096


And after!

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             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          7908       --->1689<---      6218          0          2        469
-/+ buffers/cache:       1218       6689
Swap:         8096          0       8096


Hopefully this helps you guys out. If you have any questions, post them below!

[DrHu]

http://www.thehosthelpers.com/general-c ... -is-weird/

Last post Joey


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it was indeed an authorization error.
After lots of googling I finally found this:
sudo sh -c "echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches"
sudo sh -c "echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches"
sudo sh -c "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches"
which works like a charm.

A little bit of explanation..
http://www.go2linux.org/linux/2011/01/h ... memory-880
--why you might want to use 1,2,3 or 0 for buffer cache clearing, but if you decide you need to use this command, then echo 3 is the most complete clearing switch to use..

Basically with enough RAM for your standard method of operation, neither swap activity (if any) nor cache should really affect the operation of the OS in any significant way..

On some Linux systems I did tend to use the sync command when logging out to make sure the system flushed the buffers and that I had a clean logout.

[ChickenPie4Tea]

I typed in your command and then my passowrd and just got
"bash: /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches: Permission denied"
but following the second post this was not denied
sudo sh -c "echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches"