Re: clearing the buffer cache

On Mon, 16 Feb 2009, Sam Mason wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:09:59AM -0500, Chris Mayfield wrote:
>> You can also try something like this:
>> http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Cold-start-simulator
>> might take too long in your situation of thousands of small queries.
>
> Why is this better than asking the kernel to drop its caches?

fillmem/flushdisk also work with kernels before 2.6.16, which means that
it's not avaialble on still common platforms (RHEL4 for example).  If
you've got drop_caches, it's the better approach, that pages gives an
answer if you don't too.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD