Cache in Linux memory is where the Kernel stores the information it may need later, as memory is incredible faster than disk.
It is great that the Linux Kernel takes care about that.Linux Operating system is very efficient in managing your computer memory, and will automatically free the RAM and drop the cache if some application needs memory.
Kernels 2.6.16 and newer provide a mechanism to have the kernel drop the page cache and/or inode and dentry caches on command, which can help free up a lot of memory. Now we can throw away that script that allocated a ton of memory just to get rid of the cache.
To free pagecache:
echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
To free dentries and inodes:
echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
To free pagecache, dentries and inodes:
echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
This is a non-destructive operation in normal scenarios and will only free things that are completely unused. Dirty objects will continue to be in use until written out to disk and are not freeable. However it is always preferred to run "sync" first to flush useful things out to disk.
