Doubt on echo 1 >> /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

[Jon Stanley]

On 12/21/07, Gijs <info at boer-software-en-webservices.nl> wrote:

> And yes, it is safe to do.

Safe, but not recommended.  I can't see any real-world use for this.
The only practical use of which I'm aware is if you are doing I/O
benchmarking and you want to test the actual speed of the I/O, as
opposed to the efficacy of the pagecache.  On a normal system, the
pagecache dramatically increases performance by not having to go to
disk for filesystem data or metadata, depending on what cache you're
looking at.

For a detailed explanation of the values, check out my blog at
http://jons-thoughts.blogspot.com/2007/09/tip-of-day-dropcaches.html