438. Very briefly: Freeing up RAM (sort of)

After having played around with two virtual machines simultaneous which at some point caused me to use/reserve all of my ram plus a small amount of swap (419 Mb), my desktop has been a bit slower. I don't see any real evidence that it's swapping to and from disk, but the system is much less responsive, e.g. when switching applications.

Note that when you RAM usage goes up, not all of the RAM is actually used in an active sense -- some may be reserved. Another factor to take into account is that you actually DO want to use as much RAM as possible as long as it improves performance, and this is done via caching. What's shown here is simply how to clean that cache. 

So is cleaning that cache a good thing? Well, sometimes. Empirically, it seems like dropping the caches can help if you've been doing something that caused a lot of ram to be used, but which is no longer running. Such as something heavily graphical (e.g. using VMD and rendering something) or a virtual machine.

See e.g. here for a discussion with comments: http://catalin-festila.blogspot.com.au/2011/06/myth-of-dropcaches.html

Anyway.

At the beginning this is how it looked (free -m):

            total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          7991       7488        503          0       1097        379
-/+ buffers/cache:       6011       1980
Swap:        15257        419      14838

To free up the ram cache, do

me@beryllium:~$ sudo su

[sudo] password for me:
root@beryllium:/home/me# sync
root@beryllium:/home/me# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

And when we're done it looks like this:

            total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          7991       3503       4488          0         47        147
-/+ buffers/cache:       3308       4683
Swap:        15257        419      14838

Our swap usage hasn't changed, but the apparent free RAM has increased significantly. And my computer feels snappier.

Often the need to free up RAM is precipitated by the presence of memory leaks though, since these are often manifested by the slow increase in the amount of RAM a program is using. Older versions of gnome-shell (including the one presently used in Wheezy) are known culprits, and ECCE has a tendency to eat up RAM like there's no tomorrow when running for too long (still working on getting hard numbers for it).