About once a week I hear some poor newbie scream in terror as he discovers that his box is just seconds away from a gruesome death with barely a few megabytes of memory left. How could this have happened, it was fine when I booted it this morning, why does a Linux box need 2GB of memory just to run Apache, more bloated than Vista, etc, etc.
Then you explain about the wonders of disk caching, and invariably the first question is always “How do I disable it?”
All in all, it’s a lot of repetition.
To avoid this, I registered LinuxAteMyRam.com which features a big flashing “Don’t Panic” sign and answers the most frequent questions as reassuringly as possible.
The goal is to allow people to appreciate Linux’s disk cache for the brilliant, unobtrusive and effective optimization it is, so it skips over some details like the swappiness setting.
If you have thoughts or suggestions, do comment.