6 ms·

You can run `purge` in a terminal to free your 'inactive' ram. I've set up a cron job to purge frequently, keeps thing humming.

by collint 14y ago

sabat 14y ago
Cmd line syntax, for the lazy, please?
- SimonB86 14y ago
  purge
- evoxed 14y ago
  ...sudo purge? ;) > purge // wait ~10 seconds Done.
- fromhet 14y ago
  I made a bash script for it and I'll share it, hacker 2 hacker. Goes a little something like this: #!/bin/bash purge
  - nikcub 14y ago
    post it to GitHub so I can fork it to support zsh
  - cpeterso 14y ago
    What license are you releasing your software under?
    - fromhet 14y ago
      Proprietary, nanananana
follower 14y ago
Can you explain a bit more how this works? The `purge` command has a pretty short man page: > purge -- force disk cache to be purged (flushed and emptied) > Purge can be used to approximate initial boot conditions with a cold disk buffer cache for performance analysis. It does not affect anonymous memory that has been allocated through malloc, vm_allocate, etc. [This seems to talk about it more: http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/19036310553/two-things-that-really-helped-speed-up-my-mac-and http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/19036310553/two-things-that... On my 10.5 laptop it didn't seem to dramatically decrease the memory marked "inactive".]
- collint 14y ago
  yeah, it's not directly attacking your 'inactive' memory. Just the disk cache, which shows up in the chart as 'inactive'. I'm not familiar with other cases that fit into the 'inactive' piece of the pie. I have regularly seen 1-3G of ram get free'd up on a 'purge'
eridius 14y ago
That's a terrible idea. `purge` is not a tool for freeing inactive ram. It's a tool for deleting the filesystem cache in order to simulate cold boot conditions for performance analysis. Yes, it has the side effect of reducing memory usage, inasmuch as it's throwing away stuff that was kept in memory. But that doesn't make it an appropriate tool to use.
- hughw 14y ago
  What's the downside? It worked for him.
  - collint 14y ago
    Yeah, I've had zero problems doing this for over a year. I used to get into swap hell every other day and now my life is beautiful and awesome.
  - eridius 14y ago
    The downside is it slows filesystem access down across the board until the caches get repopulated. So sure, go ahead and use it if you like having a slow filesystem. Caches exist for a reason. Deleting them willy-nilly tends to be a bad idea.
- wagerlabs 14y ago
  From my days of optimizing Firefox startup on the Mac, I remember that this doesn't work 100%. The only way to ensure that caches are 100% purged is to unmount the filesystem.

You can run `purge` in a terminal to free your 'inactive' ram. I've set up a cron job to purge frequently, keeps thing humming.

by collint 14y ago

You can run `purge` in a terminal to free your 'inactive' ram. I've set up a cron job to purge frequently, keeps thing humming.

sabat 14y ago

Cmd line syntax, for the lazy, please?

SimonB86 14y ago
purge
evoxed 14y ago
...sudo purge? ;) > purge // wait ~10 seconds Done.
fromhet 14y ago
I made a bash script for it and I'll share it, hacker 2 hacker. Goes a little something like this: #!/bin/bash purge
- nikcub 14y ago
  post it to GitHub so I can fork it to support zsh
- cpeterso 14y ago
  What license are you releasing your software under?
  - fromhet 14y ago
    Proprietary, nanananana

follower 14y ago

Can you explain a bit more how this works? The `purge` command has a pretty short man page: > purge -- force disk cache to be purged (flushed and emptied) > Purge can be used to approximate initial boot conditions with a cold disk buffer cache for performance analysis. It does not affect anonymous memory that has been allocated through malloc, vm_allocate, etc. [This seems to talk about it more: http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/19036310553/two-things-that-really-helped-speed-up-my-mac-and http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/19036310553/two-things-that... On my 10.5 laptop it didn't seem to dramatically decrease the memory marked "inactive".]

collint 14y ago
yeah, it's not directly attacking your 'inactive' memory. Just the disk cache, which shows up in the chart as 'inactive'. I'm not familiar with other cases that fit into the 'inactive' piece of the pie. I have regularly seen 1-3G of ram get free'd up on a 'purge'

eridius 14y ago

That's a terrible idea. `purge` is not a tool for freeing inactive ram. It's a tool for deleting the filesystem cache in order to simulate cold boot conditions for performance analysis. Yes, it has the side effect of reducing memory usage, inasmuch as it's throwing away stuff that was kept in memory. But that doesn't make it an appropriate tool to use.

hughw 14y ago
What's the downside? It worked for him.
- collint 14y ago
  Yeah, I've had zero problems doing this for over a year. I used to get into swap hell every other day and now my life is beautiful and awesome.
- eridius 14y ago
  The downside is it slows filesystem access down across the board until the caches get repopulated. So sure, go ahead and use it if you like having a slow filesystem. Caches exist for a reason. Deleting them willy-nilly tends to be a bad idea.
wagerlabs 14y ago
From my days of optimizing Firefox startup on the Mac, I remember that this doesn't work 100%. The only way to ensure that caches are 100% purged is to unmount the filesystem.