Page cache in Linux

cached vs buffers

Linux is a general purpose operating system instead of having specific code paths to perform what is right for a single specific task.

Linux uses all excess memory for its page cache. The linux page cache can be seen in /proc/meminfo with the statistic “Cached.” while The “Buffers” memory area is a memory area that holds raw disk data, meant as an intermediate buffer between processes, the kernel, and disk

Tuning the Page Cache

Page cache is a disk cache which holds data of files and executable programs, for example pages with actual contents of files or block devices. Page cache (disk cache) is used to reduce the number of disk reads. see more tuning page cache and Linux Wolfman's interresting test that shows the relationship between pages cache and vm.min_free_kbytes.