Read cache of course does not need to be flushed and can simply be dumped when the memory is needed, and so Linux will keep more or less unlimited amounts of read cache until it needs the memory for something else .... here is an output from "free" on my laptop, showing ~2.5GB of read cache that can be freed almost instantly if needed for process memory, write cache, kernel buffers, etc. The -/+ line shows a net of what is being used by processes.
dave:~$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 8089056 7476424 612632 0 603508 2556584
-/+ buffers/cache: 4316332 3772724
Swap: 24563344 1176284 23387060
redirecting pg_dump >/dev/null will read the DB without writing anything, but it's pretty resource intensive .... if you just want to get the database tables into the OS read cache you can do it much more cheaply with sudo tar cvf - /var/lib/postgresql/8.4/main/base | cat >/dev/null or similar (GNU tar somehow detects if you connect its stdout directly to /dev/null and then it cheats and doesn't do the reads)
In the second "free" output below, the kernel has grabbed what it can for cache, leaving only ~64MB of actual free memory for instant use.
dave:~$ pg_dump -F c hyper9db >/dev/null
dave:~$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 8089056 8024252 64804 0 287432 3797956
-/+ buffers/cache: 3938864 4150192
Swap: 24563344 1166556 23396788
dave:~$
Cheers
Dave
On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 3:06 PM, Joshua Berkus <josh@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
... but Linux rapidly cleared the cache (flushing to disk) down to 25GB within an hour.
--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com
San Francisco
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