On Fri, Dec 29, 2000 at 06:05:35PM -0800, Gabriel Rosa wrote:
>
> hey all,
>
> how does one control how much memory Linux caches?
Normally, you don't.
> Is it done? Is it supposed to be done? Is it beneficial to to so? :)
Linux has a unified memory pool which it attempts to put to the best use
possible. File caching, meta data/inodes, code pages, data pages etc.
I remember building the kernel once I upgraded my ram, was kinda eerie
how little the disk was used...
> I ask because, my new 256mb machine seems to have very little free memory,
> being as how most of it is cached, and a large chunk of it is buffered.
>
> The machine doesn't seem slow, so I'm guessing the kernel is taking care to
> dynamically structure memory usage... but... it's a little weird seeing so
> little memory free :) It makes me think I'm wasting memory.
>
> Here is what it looks like:
>
> Mem: 255544K av, 250936K used, 4608K free, 0K shrd, 4444K buff
> Swap: 104384K av, 0K used, 104384K free 210676K cached
>
> I'm running 2.4-test12, in case it differs from the 2.2 series.
If you ram a 200 MB application I'd expect the cache to shrink...
>
> thx
> -Gabriel
>
