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All posts for the day May 5th, 2011

If you need to clear out the pagecache due to inactive memory not being released you can flush out the cache in RedHat5 manually.

The /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches, allows the pagecache and slabcache to be cleared on demand.

To free the pagecache:

To free dentries and inodes:

To free pagecache, dentries and inodes:

It is recommended that sync be run prior to passing the values to /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches. Enabling drop_caches can cause deadlock if the system is under heavy memory and I/O load. It is not recommended to use this feature on system experiencing heavy load.