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

You might find John Nilsson's answer to my Question useful for purging the cache in order to test whether that is related to your problem:

sync && echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Though I'm guessing the only real difference is 1 vs 3