How to Clear Memory Cache on Linux | Linux Today

How to Clear Memory Cache on Linux

Written By
A
Anonymous
Jul 3, 2013

By default, every Linux OS has an efficient memory management system used to clear the buffer cache periodically. You can manually free up the memory cache with the following simple command:

sk@sk:~$ sudo sh -c “sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches”

However, if you want to force the Linux OS to do clearing memory cache on a particular interval, just add the command to cron job. Here, I show you how.

A

Anonymous

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