Wouldn't having (practically) all your memory used for cache slow down starting a new program? First it would have to free up that space, and then put stuff in that space, taking potentially twice as long. I think there should be a system call for freeing cached memory, for those that do want to do it.
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Erik Mouw Sent: Friday, July 22, 2005 5:58 AM To: Ashley Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Kernel cached memory On Fri, Jul 22, 2005 at 05:46:58PM +0800, Ashley wrote: > I've a server with 2 Operton 64bit CPU and 12G memory, and this server > is used to run applications which will comsume huge memory, > the problem is: when this aplications exits, the free memory of the server > is still very low(accroding to the output of "top"), and > from the output of command "free", I can see that many GB memory was cached > by kernel. Does anyone know how to free the kernel cached > memory? thanks in advance. Free memory is bad, it means the memory doesn't have a proper use. Cached memory will be freed automatically when the kernel needs memory for other (more important) things. Erik -- +-- Erik Mouw -- www.harddisk-recovery.com -- +31 70 370 12 90 -- | Lab address: Delftechpark 26, 2628 XH, Delft, The Netherlands - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/