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Edward Torvalds
Asked: 2015-11-17 11:54:35 +0800 CST

Disable RAM memory caching for a particular program

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I am running few benchmarks test using binaries made out of C. Is there anyway so I can ask kernel not to cache any part of these binary programs?

ram

1 Answers

  1. Have a look at the kernel documentation on "drop_caches".

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt

    Here's a small section:-

    Writing to this will cause the kernel to drop clean caches, as well as
reclaimable slab objects like dentries and inodes.  Once dropped, their
memory becomes free.

To free pagecache:
    echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
To free reclaimable slab objects (includes dentries and inodes):
    echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
To free slab objects and pagecache:
    echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

This is a non-destructive operation and will not free any dirty objects.
To increase the number of objects freed by this operation, the user may run
`sync' prior to writing to /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches.  This will minimize the
number of dirty objects on the system and create more candidates to be
dropped.
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