How to Clear RAM Memory Cache, Buffer and Swap Space on Linux

Like any other operating system, GNU/Linux has implemented a memory management efficiently and even more than that. But if any process is eating away your memory and you want to clear it, Linux provides a way to flush or clear ram cache.

How to Clear Cache in Linux?

Every Linux System has three options to clear cache without interrupting any processes or services.

1. Clear PageCache only.

# sync; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

2. Clear dentries and inodes.

# sync; echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

3. Clear PageCache, dentries and inodes.

# sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches 

Explanation of above command.

sync will flush the file system buffer. Command Separated by “;” run sequentially. The shell wait for each command to terminate before executing the next command in the sequence. As mentioned in kernel documentation, writing to drop_cache will clean cache without killing any application/service, command echo is doing the job of writing to file.

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