Clear the computer's memory?

[Vincent Trouilliez]

On Thu, 2006-03-30 at 08:55 +0100, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Yes, I did remember that much :)  Until your system starts using swap 
> you are probably ok. But my system /was/ using swap, 180MB of it.

Ah, that's different then. Sometimes I have a similar problem: I have
768MB of RAM, and most of the time, it uses only 150 or 200MB for normal
desktop use (web/mail/music/video playbac). But when I start a big app
like VMware, it eats all the memory. When I close VMware, all my other
apps were put to swap, so everything is super slow. I also have the same
problem when I resume the machine from suspend to disk (EVEN when the
swap was clear when putting it to sleep!)

The solution I found was to disable the swap, so that it forces Linux to
reload everything into RAM at once. This takes only a few seconds max,
depending how much is on swap and how fast your drives are, and
instantly, the desktop is as responsive as it was before I started
VMware (or whatever big program). Then of course, re-activate the swap.

Commands are:

$ sudo swapoff -a
$ sudo swapon -a


HTH


--
Vince