memory usage

[drew at drewtaylor.com (Drew Taylor)]

So buffers are essentially very fast I/O used by the kernel to speed things 
up. This is the "buffers" from /proc/meminfo. Then is the "cached" value 
I/O that has been cached in RAM by the kernel for possible future use? If 
so, then that explains why my cached value is constantly growing/shrinking 
while I stream MP3's from home via Apache::MP3 here to work.

Thanks for the info. You learn something new every day. :-)

At 11:21 AM 5/2/02 -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
>Just adding a bit to what David said.
>Unix systems buffer all I/O. The buffers are allocated by the kernel for
>all system-wide I/O. So, when you write a file (to just about any device),
>you are writing to a buffer. Note that these kernel buffers have nothing to
>do with the C language stdio package. These buffers are used by device
>drivers. The Unix sync(8) command will cause all buffers to be flushed.
>Normally there is a daemon (bdflush or update) that will sync the disks
>periodically. Essentially, the buffering and caching by the kernel is one
>of the things that makes Unix (and Linux) systems faster than Windows
>systems.



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Drew Taylor                     JA[P|m_p]H
http://www.drewtaylor.com/      Just Another Perl|mod_perl Hacker
mailto:drew at drewtaylor.com      *** God bless America! ***
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