The first thing we notice when buying a router is the drastic drop in available RAM when using an external USB drive. This issue has often been discussed on Internet discussion forums, especially on those routers that have at least 512 MB of RAM. This problem is seen as a router defect, in reality, as we will see later, it is a peculiar feature of all routers that have a Linux-based operating system.
Many users are used to memory management in Microsoft Windows. Microsoft Windows reserves a minimal part of the memory available for the disk
cache, this amount unfortunately does not increase with the increase of the Input/Output operations on disk, therefore those users who have for example 32 GB of
RAM, see a lot of available RAM not used. Linux does not have this anomaly, Linux in fact uses all available RAM as disk cache memory in order to increase the
Input/Output performance on disk. The RAM used by the router as a disk cache memory is then made available for applications and services when the latter require
it. This dynamic management of the RAM makes many routers very fast, since a part of the data is stored in RAM during Input/Output operations.
Just as there is no way to increase the amount of RAM used as disk cache in Microsoft Windows, there is no way to reduce the amount of RAM used as disk cache in
Linux. On the other hand, it is possible in Linux to free the disk cache memory with a specific command, which we will see later. This operation is definitely
not recommended, since it is simply a temporary operation, it does not take anything away from Linux the possibility of occupying the available memory again to
use it as disk cache memory for Input/Output operations. The definitive solution would be to remove the external USB disk, in this way Linux would no longer
need to reserve a good part of the available memory to use it as disk cache memory for Input/Output operations, since the disk drive is missing. This obviously
prevents the user from using external storage, the only possibility available in a router - a router does not have internal storage.
To free the disk cache memory reserved for Input/Output operations, the Linux command "sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" is
used, this command consists of two different instructions. The first instruction allows to synchronize the data still present in the disk buffers and to empty
the contents of the disk cache memory. The second instruction allows to free all the occupied buffers and therefore to free the occupied disk cache memory. This
allows to recover all the RAM memory previously occupied by the disk cache memory.
As said before it is not recommended to perform these operations frequently, but even more it is not recommended to perform them during Input/Output operations,
especially if performed by Linux services/daemons - a solution would be to stop the Linux services started by the user, perform the above operations and only
then restart the previously stopped services. The execution of the above-mentioned Linux command during the Input/Output operations could cause data corruption,
a malfunction of the router or even worse, the restart of the router itself.
To get an idea of the freed cache memory, we use the Linux "free" command, before and after running the above Linux command to free the cache memory. An
example of the "free" command executed before and after is the following - note the "used", "free" and "cached" columns:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 440420 411960 28460 828 6584 213140
-/+ buffers/cache: 192236 248184
Swap: 524284 46080 478204
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 440420 194904 245516 828 136 10892
-/+ buffers/cache: 183876 256544
Swap: 524284 46080 478204
To free the disk cache memory, a specially designed Bash script can be used to write to a .LOG file inside the router so that the user can know when the cache memory's flush operation was performed and how much RAM has been freed - this script can be used via a schedule made with the Linux "crontab". An example of Bash script could be:
#!/bin/sh CURRENTDATE="$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)" NEWLOGFILE="/opt/var/log/drop_caches.log" echo $CURRENTDATE echo $NEWLOGFILE echo "-----------------------------------------" >> $NEWLOGFILE echo $CURRENTDATE >> $NEWLOGFILE echo " " >> $NEWLOGFILE free >> $NEWLOGFILE echo " " >> $NEWLOGFILE sync sync echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches sync free >> $NEWLOGFILE echo "-----------------------------------------" >> $NEWLOGFILE