[erlang-questions] Memory not freed after VM closed

[Motiejus Jakštys]

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 11:27 AM, tom kelly <ttom.kelly@REDACTED> wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> We're confused here by a memory usage problem that we're seeing. We're
> writing a lot of data chunks to disk and are seeing higher than
> expected memory usage, that lingers even after the Erlang VM has
> stopped.
>
> We're easily confused here at the best of times ;-) so if anyone can
> shed any light on what's holding onto this RAM it'd be much
> appreciated! Ideally we'd like to get this 300MB freed up straight
> away after writing everything to disk.
>

Hi, Tom,

like Patrick said, probably it is disk cache by linux kernel. Run this
to verify:

$ echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

This command instructs kernel to release disk cache. Inspect your
memory after running this command and confirm.

-- 
Motiejus Jakštys