Is it possible to list the files that are cached?

Well, there is an easy way to take a look at the kernel's page cache if you happen to have ftools - "fincore" gives you some summary information on what files' pages are the content of the cache.

You will need to supply a list of file names to check for their presence in the page cache. This is because the information stored in the kernel's page cache tables only will contain data block references and not filenames. fincore would resolve a given file's data blocks through inode data and search for respective entries in the page cache tables.

There is no efficient search mechanism for doing the reverse - getting a file name belonging to a data block would require reading all inodes and indirect blocks on the file system. If you need to know about every single file's blocks stored in the page cache, you would need to supply a list of all files on your file system(s) to fincore. But that again is likely to spoil the measurement as a large amount of data would be read traversing the directories and getting all inodes and indirect blocks - putting them into the page cache and evicting the very page cache data you were trying to examine.

You can use the vmtouch utility to see if a named file or directory is in cache. You can also use the tool to force items into cache or lock them into cache.

[root@xt ~]# vmtouch -v /usr/local/var/orca/procallator.cfg
/usr/local/var/orca/procallator.cfg
[     ] 0/5

           Files: 1
     Directories: 0
  Resident Pages: 0/5  0/20K  0%
         Elapsed: 0.000215 seconds

Now I can "touch" it into cache.

[root@xt ~]# vmtouch -vt /usr/local/var/orca/procallator.cfg
/usr/local/var/orca/procallator.cfg
[OOOOO] 5/5

           Files: 1
     Directories: 0
   Touched Pages: 5 (20K)
         Elapsed: 0.005313 seconds

Now to see how much is cached...

[root@xt ~]# vmtouch -v /usr/local/var/orca/procallator.cfg
/usr/local/var/orca/procallator.cfg
[OOOOO] 5/5

           Files: 1
     Directories: 0
  Resident Pages: 5/5  20K/20K  100%
         Elapsed: 0.000241 seconds

You can also use pcstat (Page Cache Stat) https://github.com/tobert/pcstat

Hope it helps someone.

I write a very simple shell script to show the cached files by using of linux-fincore. Since cache is one part of memory, my code is find the top 10 RSZ usage of process, and the use lsof to find out the files that process opened, finally use linux-fincore to find out whether these files are cached or not.

Please correct me if I am thinkg wrong.

#!/bin/bash
#Author: Shanker
#Time: 2016/06/08

#set -e
#set -u
#you have to install linux-fincore
if [ ! -f /usr/local/bin/linux-fincore ]
then
    echo "You haven't installed linux-fincore yet"
    exit
fi

#find the top 10 processs' cache file
ps -e -o pid,rss|sort -nk2 -r|head -10 |awk '{print $1}'>/tmp/cache.pids
#find all the processs' cache file
#ps -e -o pid>/tmp/cache.pids

if [ -f /tmp/cache.files ]
then
    echo "the cache.files is exist, removing now "
    rm -f /tmp/cache.files
fi

while read line
do
    lsof -p $line 2>/dev/null|awk '{print $9}' >>/tmp/cache.files 
done</tmp/cache.pids


if [ -f /tmp/cache.fincore ]
then
    echo "the cache.fincore is exist, removing now"

    rm -f /tmp/cache.fincore
fi

for i in `cat /tmp/cache.files`
do

    if [ -f $i ]
    then

        echo $i >>/tmp/cache.fincore
    fi
done

linux-fincore -s  `cat /tmp/cache.fincore`

rm -f /tmp/cache.{pids,files,fincore}

I wrote following script which prints all files and their cache status using pcstat command. It is self-contained script for x86_64 linux systems. It downloads pcstat if needed .

First argument is filesystem location to analyze and second argument is number of result (Top N by number of pages in cache).

#!/bin/bash
#Exit if a variable is not set
set -o nounset
#Exit on first error
set -o errexit

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 <root-dir> [number-of-results]"
echo
echo "Example $0 /var 10"
echo "will show top 10 files in /var which are loaded in cache"
exit
fi

ROOT=$1
#Number of results to show
HOW_MANY=50
[ -n ${2-} ] && HOW_MANY=$2


SCRIPT_DIR="$( cd -P "$( dirname "$0" )" && pwd )"
if [ ! -x $SCRIPT_DIR/pcstat ]; then
(
cd $SCRIPT_DIR
rm -f pcstat
curl -L -o pcstat https://github.com/tobert/pcstat/raw/2014-05-02-01/pcstat.x86_64
chmod +x pcstat
)
fi

FIND="find ${ROOT} -not ( -path /proc -prune ) -not ( -path /sys -prune ) -type f -size +0c -print0"
$FIND |  xargs -0 ${SCRIPT_DIR}/pcstat -terse -nohdr | sort --field-separator=, -r -n -k 6 | head -n ${HOW_MANY}