[ale] Disk performance

[agcarver+ale at acarver.net (Alex Carver)]

On 8/25/2013 19:34, Brian Mathis wrote:
>
> The 'free' command will directly show you how much of the used RAM is in
> buffers/cache, and how much is in use by programs.  As far as reducing RAM
> used for cache, you almost always don't want to do that.  RAM is both fast
> and expensive, so unused RAM is wasted RAM.  Linux is smart enough to be
> able to free buffers/cache when a program needs to use it.

I know in theory it's supposed to be smart enough but I don't think 
that's the case on this particular system.  It appears to be caching 
things that don't get reused so there's almost no value to the cache.

The main job of this particular system is to log data and then present a 
few micro websites (20-30kB pages) that update regularly.  Each page is 
dynamic (generated each visit by polling the database) so there isn't 
much to cache.