Cache was eating up my free ram causing scripts not to run, this was my fix

[tkrn]

I created a clear_disk_cache.sh script and had the following in it

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

Then manually put it in the root's cron job at /var/spool/cron/root to run every 10 minutes, I experimented with a few other values and found the 10 minute cron job was a good time.

Now my system runs with 150-256mb physical ram free at any given moment giving enough memory to scripts and other memory intensive services that need it more than cache. Before I did this, I would often have 12-25 MB of free physical ram which caused a whole bunch of issues.

Let me know if any body else has results from this as well.

Original credits to Linux: How To Clear The Cache From Memory

[ModServ]

When I do that, It makes the server that has just been rebooted and suffer from high load as the visitors start to work on those sites again, Just like apache restart but after some minutes the load becomes normal again. I think that if you restart httpd and mysql you will get results near from drop caches.