How to clean caches used by the Linux kernel

Question

I want to force the Linux kernel to allocate more memory to applications after the cache starts taking up too much memory (as can be seen by the output of \'free\').

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Answer 1

The contents of /proc/meminfo tell you what the kernel uses RAM for.

You can use /proc/sys/vm/vfs_cache_pressure to force the kernel to reclaim memory that is used for filesystem-related caches more lazily or eagerly.

Note that your application may only benefit from tuning this parameter if it does little or no disk I/O.