Flush windows read cache

Echoing Greg, the way to work around this problem is to ensure that the data-set you're working with greatly exceeds the amount of available RAM. If you're doing testing on a hardware platform that also includes significant amount of controller and disk based caches, you'll want to ensure you're exceeding those amounts as well.

This will ensure that the performance you see is more tied in with true hardware performance than the software optimizations all those layers of cache introduce. That said, if you're really just looking to purge the read cache of useful data before running your benchmarks which WANT to use read-cache, the way to do it is to read in a single file sized just under your read-cache memory and do some file operations to it.

This will purge the cache and fill it with this single large file. Once you close it, your cache is effectively flushed of the data you care about. The tricky part is figuring out how large that file needs to be, which these days could very well be on the order of 3GB in size; at which point you may need several 1GB junk-files to make it work. I think most any option will be "manual stuff". Take a look at this answer I just posted to my own question on StackOverflow.

Basically: If you attempt to CreateFile a handle without write-share access, then it will flush and then invalidate the cache, even if it returns an error. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. How to clear Windows disk read cache? Ask Question. Asked 12 years, 1 month ago.

Active 8 years, 3 months ago. Viewed 18k times. Improve this question. Sebastiaan M Sebastiaan M 1 1 gold badge 2 2 silver badges 8 8 bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Best Portable Chargers. Best Phone Chargers. Best Wi-Fi Range Extenders. Best Oculus Quest 2 Accessories. Best iPad Air Cases. Awesome PC Accessories. Best Linux Laptops. Best Wireless iPhone Earbuds.

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In general, you have three different options for clearing your RAM manually:. The task manager has long been an established feature in Windows systems.

The background service lists running applications, services, and processes and also provides an overview of CPU and memory usage.

Press these three buttons simultaneously to open the interface. Now go through the list of active processes and search for those that you do not need — for example, because you have already closed the program. An interesting alternative to memory management via the task manager is to write a script that frees up a specified amount of RAM when it is executed. That sounds like a complex task at first glance — but you don't need any programming experience. A small entry in a simple text document created for this purpose is completely sufficient.

To create a script to clear the RAM, proceed as follows:. Then save the file under the desired name. Make sure that ANSI is set as the encoding form if the editor offers an appropriate option. The last step is to replace the default extension. Only in this way can Windows determine that the file is a script. You can now execute the script simply by double-clicking it. The code proposed here automatically releases 32 megabytes of main memory, and this process can be repeated as often as required.

However, the value should never exceed half of the built-in memory size — otherwise there is a risk of program errors or even system crashes. If you want to use an external solution instead of the system-internal possibilities for memory cleaning, this is also possible without problems: there are various programs that were developed especially for this purpose and are mostly freeware.

One of the most popular tools of this kind is Wise Memory Optimiser. The program by the developer company WiseCleaner is completely free of charge and available for all current Windows systems. After you install and start Wise Memory Optimizer, you will be taken to the main screen of the application, which displays both the occupied and free memory.

Use the slider to specify how much should be cleared from the RAM automatically for example, if less than MB is free, then the RAM should be optimized. Also read: — How to delete windows 10 update cache to get rid of unwanted files Windows 10, stores significant amounts of cache to make the system faster and more responsive compared to previous versions, this indeed is very efficient if you have tons of Free storage and free ram to work with, or a high performance cpu.

Step 2 -Now, click on run.