NAME¶

nocache - don't use Linux page cache on given command

SYNOPSIS¶

nocache [-n <n>] command [argument...]

OPTIONS¶

-n <n> "Set number of fadvise calls"

Execute the `posix_fadvise` system call <n> times in a row. Depending on your machine, this might give better results (use it if in your tests `nocache` fails to eradicate pages from cache properly).

DESCRIPTION¶

The `nocache` tool tries to minimize the effect an application has on the Linux file system cache. This is done by intercepting the `open` and `close` system calls and calling `posix_fadvise` with the `POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED` parameter. Because the library remembers which pages (ie., 4K-blocks of the file) were already in file system cache when the file was opened, these will not be marked as "don't need", because other applications might need that, although they are not actively used (think: hot standby).

ALTERNATIVE: HOW TO USE CGROUPS TO RESTRICT CACHE USE¶

If your use case is a backup processes that should not interfere with the present state of the cache too much, consider using cgroups instead. They're much cleaner and carry less overhead than this tool.

For example, if your system uses systemd, you can do:

systemd-run --scope --property=MemoryLimit=500M -- backup command

For more info, see the README on https://github.com/Feh/nocache