In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 10/24/98 at 11:55 AM, Mark Phillips <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
>On Fri, 23 Oct 1998, Joey Hess wrote: >> Mark Phillips wrote: >> > I run latex a lot and every time I run it, it has to load in library files >> > from disk, which takes time. I could try to buy a fast but expensive SCSI >> > drive, but I thought probably a cheaper way would be to buy more memory >> > and somehow use it to cache my existing hard drives -- ie stuff which is >> > commonly read from the disk would be stored in memory. >> > >> > Is there software in linux which will do this? >> >> Yes. Install more memory and linux will do this automatically. >How does it know how much memory is to be used for caching? Can you set >this? (I presume the caching software is part of the kernel.) *All* memory not used for anything else is used for caching. I.e. all free memory on the system. The more you have, the more cache you have. If all memory is used up (and the system start swapping) then you have little (but not zero) cache left. How much to reserve is tunable via the /proc interface (or by changing the source.) Look at man-pages for "free" and "vmstat" and such. Helge Hafting
