On 12/21/07, Gijs <info boer-software-en-webservices nl> wrote:
And yes, it is safe to do.
Safe, but not recommended. I can't see any real-world use for this.
The only practical use of which I'm aware is if you are doing I/O
benchmarking and you want to test the actual speed of the I/O, as
opposed to the efficacy of the pagecache. On a normal system, the
pagecache dramatically increases performance by not having to go to
disk for filesystem data or metadata, depending on what cache you're
looking at.
For a detailed explanation of the values, check out my blog at
http://jons-thoughts.blogspot.com/2007/09/tip-of-day-dropcaches.html