Clearing Memory (RAM) Cache on CentOS

Question

I know this has been asked in a similar way in the past but I'm just curious.

If I made a script and made it run every midnight to check if my memory usage was higher than let's say, 80... would it be a bad idea to make the script automatically run sync; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches? I often get into an issue where my RAM usage gets to 99% because of this and I'm just getting a little bit worried.

Thanks in advance.

Solution

You don't need to do this. Linux will drop all caches if it needs the RAM for other purposes. See http://www.linuxatemyram.com/ and Why is Linux reporting "free" memory strangely? for more information.

Comments

[Admin]

possible duplicate of Why drop caches in Linux?

[Sreeraj]

How do you check the memory usage and free memory?

[user3650841]

$ free | grep Mem | awk '{print $3/$2 * 100.0}'

[David Schwartz]

Are you seriously asking how to get your computer to waste more memory rather than using it efficiently?