After adding the preload
package, my applications seem to speed up but if I copy a large file, the file cache grows by more than double the size of the file.
By transferring a single 3-4 GB virtualbox image or video file to an external drive, this huge cache seems to remove all the preloaded applications from memory, leading to increased load times and general performance drops.
Is there a way to copy large, multi-gigabyte files without caching them (i.e. bypassing the file cache)? Or a way to whitelist or blacklist specific folders from being cached?
echo 50000000 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_bytes
andecho 200000000 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_bytes
. For more details, see lonesysadmin.net/2013/12/22/… for details.