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Tidbit of information I picked up off a Linux forum after finding unzip had pretty much gobbled all memory after decompressing a large archive.
I ran this command to clear the memory cache (via a simple shell: clearmem).
[c]sh -c "sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches"[/c]
Before and after printout...
[c]root@rmp5710:/# free[/c]
[c]total used free shared buffers[/c]
[c]Mem: 229520 225652 3868 0 1740[/c]
[c]-/+ buffers: 223912 5608[/c]
[c]Swap: 0 0 0[/c]
[c]root@rmp5710:/# clearmem[/c]
[c]root@rmp5710:/# free[/c]
[c]total used free shared buffers[/c]
[c]Mem: 229520 15988 213532 0 476[/c]
[c]-/+ buffers: 15512 214008[/c]
[c]Swap: 0 0 0[/c]
Full story can be found here. You might want to read the comments as most were positive though there were some on the negative side. Works well for me with no ill side affects. I now run it as a nightly cron job and at the end of cgi scripts.. those that run unzip or other memory hogs.
[c]http://www.unixmen.com/how-to-clear-memory-cache-on-linux-servers/[/c]
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>unzip had pretty much gobbled all memory after decompressing a large archive.
http://www.linuxatemyram.com/
And dont mess with disk caching subsystem.
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Thank you.. I appreciate information on the topic. I have been reading further and find clearing the disk cache questionable as I originally read and posted. The information found on the link you posted mentions it speeds up the system rather than slowing it down. Real time evaluations I have found no difference before or after clearing the disk cache. I will further research the topic and appreciate you and any others bring me up to speed as I am a newbie who likes to gobble up information and learn. I sincerely appreciate you, mojo, and others taking the time to help/bring me up to speed.. though at 60 my processing is much slowwer. 
Allen
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Allen, by manually clearing cache, you also clear caches of all running programs and force them to re-read stuff from your hdd and recache it.
The system will clear caches by itself if needed, no there is actually no need for doing manual cache drop (maybe for debug or testing, but not for everyday pc usage)
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Again thank you dev for the additional information. I truly hope others are reading this thread including doing their own research on the subject as I find it important knowledge.
I find this interesting. I abandoned my original bash script which used unzip to decompress archives. I switched to php. Php's class ZipArchive seems much better at memory management as it uses half the memory unzip used to decompress the same archive. Any idea why?
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