Please, the memory and the cache are getting to the full level quite quickly under my linux mint 9 - isadora system. I used Ubuntu and Debian before, and it was not causing this issue at all. At the current time i typing the following command frequently to empty the cache "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches".
Please any way around this? or do you know what's going wrong? | I am only programming on this machine; no graphics, no games nothing.
Thanks in advance for your help!
The kernel uses an algorithm that attempts to fill the cache with as much stuff as possible. Its a cache, that is what its there for and the more stuff in cache the less stuff we potentially have to go back to disk for. Remember disk can be 100 times slower than the cache.
Why is this a problem or what issue are you experiencing? What are you using to see how "full" the memory is? You should be using the +/- buffers/cache column of free:
$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 968304 922820 45484 0 318792 205404
-/+ buffers/cache: 398624 569680
Swap: 0 0 0
This system has more than half its memory free. Its in a pretty happy state.
A system with lots of memory free on the Mem column generally means it has so much memory the kernel can't even find a use for it (e.g. more memory than the size of the database). This means you have wasted memory.
Linux will use as much memory as it can, as a cache. If it didn't, there would be more disc traffic to re-read info from disk all the time. As soon as it's required for something more useful, it will be used for that. Don't worry, it knows what it is doing.
This is by design. Most Linux systems cache as much as possible and free up memory on an as-needed basis.
