On Mon, 28 Jun 1999 10:47:54 +1000, Dancer <dancer@zeor.simegen.com>
said:
> Possibly an equally dense question is: can the buffer-cache and the
> page-cache be disabled independantly? (and on a system where
> file-data-caching is wasteful, is it practical?)
No. The "caches" are also "buffers". In other words, they don't just
hold unused data which is being remembered in case it is needed again
soon: they also hold data which is in active use. Filesystems rely on
the buffer cache as a place to store metadata for currently-accessed
files. The virtual memory system relies on the page cache to hold
executable code in memory.
Tuning the rate at which we prune unused data out of the caches may be
appropriate if you have unusual memory requirements, but disabling the
caches is not (at least not unless you want to write your own
filesystems which use alternative IO mechanisms).
--Stephen
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