Writing to this will cause the kernel to drop clean caches, dentries and inodes from memory, causing that memory to become free.

To free pagecache:

* echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

To free dentries and inodes:

* echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

To free pagecache, dentries and inodes:

* echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

As this is a non-destructive operation, and dirty objects are not freeable, the user should run «sync» first in order to make sure all cached objects are freed.

This tunable was added in 2.6.16.