16 Mar 2023 - tags:
For benchmarking e.g. the performance of the SquashFS file system it might be necessary to drop caches:
# free pagecache
sync; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
# free reclaimable slab objects (includes dentries and inodes):
sync; echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
# free slab objects and pagecache:
sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
Also see https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt