If you’re not aware of what preload is, it’s a command line application that allows you to add files to ram, so they can be accessed faster by the applications that need them.
It seems to work well for what I’m using it for, which is to run games from slower storage devices, but there doesn’t seem to be any documentation for a proper way to remove the files once they’ve been added to ram. What I’ve been doing is to just use htop to terminate the preload command, but I feel like this is not intended at all. Is there a better way to remove these files?
I should mention that while trying to search for a solution myself, I did see gopreload mentioned a few times. I would try this out myself, but there’s no proper installation instructions, at least not any I could find that work in Linux Mint.
When you open and read files from a program the OS (kernel) will typically cache part or all of those files in memory. This is to speed up subsequent reads of that file since disk access is slow.
“preload” seems to be making use of that feature.
The kernel maintains this cache and evicts (unloads) things from it as needed. You don’t need to worry about it.
After doing some more “extreme” tests, it seems like I was wrong about how preload works. In fact, it didn’t seem to actually preload the files at all, so I’m not sure what it actually does. I ran
sudo sysctl vm.drop_caches=1to make sure that none of the game’s files were loaded and then used preload like I did yesterday, but the game still has hitching issues. This means that the game’s files were probably still loaded in RAM when I was trying it yesterday.