Cache Management (Memory/Buffer/Disk) on Linux systems without interrupting any processes or services

By default, every Linux OS has an efficient memory management system used to clear the buffer cache periodically.

Many times systems faces low memory issues of Linux systems running a while. The reason is that Linux uses so much memory for disk cache is because the RAM is wasted if it isn’t used. Cache is used to keep data to use frequently by the operating system. Reading data from cache if 1000’s time faster than reading data from hard drive.
It’s good for the os to get data from the cache in memory. But if any data not found in the cache, it reads from hard disk. So it’s no problem to flush cache memory. This article has details about how to Flush Memory Cache on Linux Server.

You can manually free up the memory cache with the following simple command:

There are three options available to flush the cache of Linux memory. Use one of below as per your requirements.

Free pagecache, dentries and inodes in cache memory

# sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Explanation of above command.

sync will flush the file system buffer. Command Separated by “;” run sequentially. The shell wait for each command to terminate before executing the next command in the sequence. As mentioned in kernel documentation, writing to drop_cache will clean cache without killing any application/service, command echo is doing the job of writing to file.

If you have to clear the disk cache, the third command is safest in enterprise and production as “...echo 1 > ….” will clear the PageCache only. It is not recommended to use first option above “...echo 3 >” in production until you know what you are doing, as it will clear PageCache, dentries and inodes.

Free dentries and inodes use following command

# sync; echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Free pagecache only use following command

# sync; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Schedule Cron to Flush Cache Regularly

# crontab -l

0 * * *  * sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

The above cron will execute on every hour and flushes the memory cache on your system.

Is it good idea to auto clear RAM cache on production server?

No! it is not. Think of a situation when you have scheduled the script to clear ram cache everyday at 2am. Everyday at 2am the script is executed and it flushes your RAM cache. One day for whatsoever reason, may be more than expected users are online on your website and seeking resource from your server.

At the same time scheduled script run and clears everything in cache. Now all the user are fetching data from disk. It will result in server crash and corrupt the database. So clear ram-cache only when required.

Is it a good idea to free Buffer and Cache in Linux that might be used by Linux Kernel?

When you are applying various settings and want to check, if it is actually implemented specially on I/O-extensive benchmark, then you may need to clear buffer cache. You can drop cache as explained above without rebooting the System i.e., no downtime required.

Linux is designed in such a way that it looks into disk cache before looking onto the disk. If it finds the resource in the cache, then the request doesn’t reach the disk. If we clean the cache, the disk cache will be less useful as the OS will look for the resource on the disk.

Moreover it will also slow the system for a few seconds while the cache is cleaned and every resource required by OS is loaded again in the disk-cache.

Seeing what’s in the buffers and cache

Take a look at linux-ftools if you'd like to analyze the contents of the buffers & cache. Specifically if you'd like to see what files are currently being cached.

fincore

With this tool you can see what files are being cached within a give directory.

fincore [options] files...
  --pages=false      Do not print pages
  --summarize        When comparing multiple files, print a summary report
  --only-cached      Only print stats for files that are actually in cache.

For example, /var/lib/mysql/blogindex:

root@test-server:/var/lib/mysql/blogindex# fincore --pages=false --summarize --only-cached * 
stats for CLUSTER_LOG_2019_05_21.MYI: file size=93840384 , total pages=22910 , cached pages=1 , cached size=4096, cached perc=0.004365 
stats for CLUSTER_LOG_2019_05_22.MYI: file size=417792 , total pages=102 , cached pages=1 , cached size=4096, cached perc=0.980392 
stats for CLUSTER_LOG_2019_05_23.MYI: file size=826368 , total pages=201 , cached pages=1 , cached size=4096, cached perc=0.497512 
stats for CLUSTER_LOG_2019_05_24.MYI: file size=192512 , total pages=47 , cached pages=1 , cached size=4096, cached perc=2.127660 
stats for CLUSTER_LOG_2019_06_03.MYI: file size=345088 , total pages=84 , cached pages=43 , cached size=176128, cached perc=51.190476 
stats for CLUSTER_LOG_2019_06_04.MYD: file size=1478552 , total pages=360 , cached pages=97 , cached size=397312, cached perc=26.944444 
stats for CLUSTER_LOG_2019_06_04.MYI: file size=205824 , total pages=50 , cached pages=29 , cached size=118784, cached perc=58.000000 
stats for COMMENT_CONTENT_2019_06_03.MYI: file size=100051968 , total pages=24426 , cached pages=10253 , cached size=41996288, cached perc=41.975764 
stats for COMMENT_CONTENT_2019_06_04.MYD: file size=716369644 , total pages=174894 , cached pages=79821 , cached size=326946816, cached perc=45.639645 
stats for COMMENT_CONTENT_2019_06_04.MYI: file size=56832000 , total pages=13875 , cached pages=5365 , cached size=21975040, cached perc=38.666667 
stats for FEED_CONTENT_2019_06_03.MYI: file size=1001518080 , total pages=244511 , cached pages=98975 , cached size=405401600, cached perc=40.478751 
stats for FEED_CONTENT_2019_06_04.MYD: file size=9206385684 , total pages=2247652 , cached pages=1018661 , cached size=4172435456, cached perc=45.321117 
stats for FEED_CONTENT_2019_06_04.MYI: file size=638005248 , total pages=155763 , cached pages=52912 , cached size=216727552, cached perc=33.969556 
stats for FEED_CONTENT_2019_06_04.frm: file size=9840 , total pages=2 , cached pages=3 , cached size=12288, cached perc=150.000000 
stats for PERMALINK_CONTENT_2019_06_03.MYI: file size=1035290624 , total pages=252756 , cached pages=108563 , cached size=444674048, cached perc=42.951700 
stats for PERMALINK_CONTENT_2019_06_04.MYD: file size=55619712720 , total pages=13579031 , cached pages=6590322 , cached size=26993958912, cached perc=48.533080 
stats for PERMALINK_CONTENT_2019_06_04.MYI: file size=659397632 , total pages=160985 , cached pages=54304 , cached size=222429184, cached perc=33.732335 
stats for PERMALINK_CONTENT_2019_06_04.frm: file size=10156 , total pages=2 , cached pages=3 , cached size=12288, cached perc=150.000000 
---
total cached size: 32847278080

With the above output you can see that there are several *.MYD, *.MYI, and *.frm files that are currently being cached.

Hope you like the tutorial. Please let me know your feedback in the response section.

Happy learning!