General question about caching

[linas at austin.ibm.com]

On Fri, Apr 02, 2004 at 11:20:31AM -0500, Christopher R. Johnson wrote:
>
> I have a tight footprint, and no swapping (in fact no disks).  I notice
> that /proc/meminfo reports:
...

> I only have rom and ram-based file systems, so I believe that disk
> caching could and maybe should be reduced to use less space.  Can I

Why?  What's wrong with the way it is?  Is it impacting performance?
Thrashing?  I can see a vague argument that its (nearly) pointless
to cache buffers from ramdisk ... but it would take some work to flesh
out this argument.

That said, you can play with parameters in /proc/sys/vm although
none of those directly affect the buffer cache size.  Indirectly,
setting the flush times to zero might shrink the effective buffer
cache, though... maybe. And it might hurt performance, maybe ...

--linas

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