File system cache stats.

[James Wilkinson]

Naoki wrote:
> What's the best way to get a feeling for how the file system cache is
> working?

That's a very open-ended question. Normally, "it does", and the only
reasons for looking at it are if you're hacking on it or if you're
looking after a large machine with a particular usage pattern and
performance needs (for example, a large database machine with lots of
user process running against it).

You can take a look at free or vmstat from the procps package to see
how much memory is being used for buffers and caching [1].

What do you want to know?

James.

[1] Incidentally, /usr/src/linux-*/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
says
     Buffers: Relatively temporary storage for raw disk blocks
              shouldn't get tremendously large (20MB or so)
      Cached: in-memory cache for files read from the disk (the
              pagecache). 

-- 
E-mail address: james | "Isn't air travel wonderful?  Breakfast in London,
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | dinner in New York, luggage in Brazil."