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Disabling file system caching

DISCUSSION Jean-Eric Cuendet 4 participants 4 messages Jan 19, 2003 – Jan 20, 2003

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#0 lore raw

Hi,
Is it possible to disable file caching for a given partition or mount?
Or at least to limit it at a certain quantity of memory?
I think of a BIG compilation (several GB of files) and would tell gcc to not cache the compiled files. Thanks
-jec

#1 lore raw
Quoted 1 line · Jean-Eric Cuendet

Is it possible to disable file caching for a given partition or mount?

No, if you do that mmap(), read(), write() etc. would be impossible.

Quoted 1 line

Or at least to limit it at a certain quantity of memory?

Not yet. I'm thinking of implementing something like this for the next version of -rmap (reclaim only from the cache if the cache occupies more than a certain fraction of ram).

Quoted 2 lines

I think of a BIG compilation (several GB of files) and would tell gcc to not cache the compiled files.

But what about the .h files ? You will want to cache those.

regards,

Rik

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#2 lore raw
Quoted 2 lines
Quoted 1 line

Is it possible to disable file caching for a given partition or mount?

No, if you do that mmap(), read(), write() etc. would be impossible.

Hmmm, maybe there's some way to explicitly flush the read/write-cache? Ok, sync will do nice for the write-cache, but for the read-one?

#3 lore raw
Quoted 7 lines · Folkert van Heusden
Quoted 3 lines
Quoted 1 line

Is it possible to disable file caching for a given partition or mount?

No, if you do that mmap(), read(), write() etc. would be impossible.

Hmmm, maybe there's some way to explicitly flush the read/write-cache? Ok, sync will do nice for the write-cache, but for the read-one?

AFAIK, you simply can't... I'm trying to do this for several months and no luck. Linux simply caches everything it can in the read-cache. For 99% of all cases this is very good but, for some situations, this is not desireable.

For the write cache, you can minimize memory usage playing with /proc/sys/vm (see Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt).

Regards,
Nuno Silva

Quoted 8 lines

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