Clearing Cache in Kubuntu...?

Hey guys I have been playing around with linux on and off for the past few years. And in the last year I installed Kubuntu 7.04(I think that is the version) on my I9300, and I have tried using windows emulation software to run windows through linux so I can run PS CS3 inside linux. Which works up to a point. For the disk cache fills up after running the emulator for an X amount of time. And then my computer gets horribly sluggish. And the same goes for anything else i do in linux. As soon as my disk cache gets filled up it gets super slow. In windows all I have to do is close the program that is taking up the cache(RAM) and it clears it automatically. But for some reason linux wont do the same...

Any ideas here? I have asked around other forums with no success so I thought I would just ask around here in hope someone will know how to fix this.

Thanks,
FAceleSS

 

What kind of emulator are you running? Because Wine isn't an emulator, it's a compatibility layer, and if CS3 is allocating files or RAM and not releasing them, perhaps you need to kill the actual wine process, rather than just trying to close the CS3 window. Wine could still be running. And, do you lose performance when you close it? Because Linux will not clear the cache unless it's requested again by a new program. It will fill up all the RAM you have available with caching files and such, but that's not a bad thing because it makes restarting programs or reloading files faster. This is the output of "free" from my server machine:

Code:

david@Pinky:~$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        255820     247524       8296          0      48272      58808
-/+ buffers/cache:     140444     115376
Swap:       747012        160     746852

Notice how there are 256MB of RAM, only 8 free? The machine just works as a web server, and has 115MB of cached data. So that means I could theoretically allocate 115MB of data on it with no penalty, even though I "only" have 8MB of actual free RAM.

 

Thanks Pitabread for the reply. I was unable to get WINE to run CS3 so I got an emulator( www.virtualbox.org ) that let me install windows XP to run seamlessly with Linux. Here is a screenshot of what it looked like.
http://faceless-21.deviantart.com/art/My-new-sexy-Linux-desktop-D-64987496

Even when I closed Vbox I was unable to clear the disk cache. Also ANY application that used a lot of RAM did the same thing(clogged up the disk cache and made my PC stupidly slow) But running the emulator just sucked up the RAM the fastest...

 

Ahhh. So you're talking about the swap file? You can't "clear" the swap file. When stop the program, the swap pages are invalidated, and so Linux will swap out whatever the next program is. Programs don't fill up any kinds of disk caches with files you can access or delete when they start using lots of memory. That's true under both Windows and Linux. The OS just pages bits of the RAM out to a big file that acts like more RAM, except that it's really slow.

 

Hey thanks for the reply and sorry for my tardy response haha.

I dont have Kubuntu open at the moment but the PC started slowing down when the "disk cache" was filled(or over filled haha) But you are right about the swap file(or page file..?) Windows has it and when I close say Photoshop, it goes from using 1.5gbs of RAM down to 500mb(or whatever figure it would be without PS)
But in Kubuntu when I closed a program the "disk cache" never emptied, and the PC stayed super slow... So I just came to the conclusion that if my PC got super slow when the "disk cache" got filled up and it got filled up after using higher powered programs like PS. And after closing said programs the Computer stayed super slow and the "disk cache" stayed full. The problem could be fixed by finding out how to make that "disk cache" empty itself either by a command, or by closing a program(but since closing the programs didnt do anything, I ruled that out) Did that make sense? Cause I am semi tired and will sometimes jumble my thoughts together in semi incoherent ways

Anyway now I am here... So if you have an idea or a question for me, I would be grateful for your input

Thanks