Re: Limiting Disck Cache

[Adam Aube <aaube01@baker.edu>]

Ivan Garcia Sainz-Aja wrote:

> how can i limit the amount of this cache linux uses?
> 
> i'm using an external usb hd for playing movies/mp3 but
> after a time of usage the memory becomes full and the system
> virtually unusable and i got to umount/mount the drive to
> keep working

You don't say what kernel you are using - on 2.6-series kernels you can tune
the 'swappiness' setting in /proc/sys/vm. Lower this value to make the
kernel more aggressively reclaim memory used for buffers and disk cache.

Adam