Naoki wrote: > What's the best way to get a feeling for how the file system cache is > working? That's a very open-ended question. Normally, "it does", and the only reasons for looking at it are if you're hacking on it or if you're looking after a large machine with a particular usage pattern and performance needs (for example, a large database machine with lots of user process running against it). You can take a look at free or vmstat from the procps package to see how much memory is being used for buffers and caching [1]. What do you want to know? James. [1] Incidentally, /usr/src/linux-*/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt says Buffers: Relatively temporary storage for raw disk blocks shouldn't get tremendously large (20MB or so) Cached: in-memory cache for files read from the disk (the pagecache). -- E-mail address: james | "Isn't air travel wonderful? Breakfast in London, @westexe.demon.co.uk | dinner in New York, luggage in Brazil."