Precache all the things!

Having a lot of RAM nowadays is relatively cheap and Linux can make a good use of it. With tools like preload most of Linux distributions are trying to proactively read things that you might want to use soon.

However if your desktop have a ridiculous amount of memory (mine has 32GB) it may take ages for these tools to make use of all that memory. And why would you pay for it and then let it just sit idle instead of working for you?

The thing is: you can do much better, because you know what you are going to use in the future.

So, as always, let’s write a tiny script under the name precache.

#!/bin/sh

exec nice -n 20 ionice -c 3 find "${1:-.}" -xdev -type f \
    -exec nice -n 20 ionice -c 3 cat '{}' \; > /dev/null

Personally I keep it as $HOME/bin/precache.

The basic idea is to traverse through all the sub-directories of an argument using find and read all the files from the disk, discarding their output. If no argument is given precache will traverse the current directory.

The nice and ionice commands are used to force all of this to be done only when the system is really idle, so it’s not slowing down anything else.

Keep in mind that the script will not switch to different filesystems (-xdev option).

All of this is done to make Linux fill the free memory with cached data so it’s already waiting for you when you need it. You can check the memory usage using top command. The cached position is the one that we want to increase to the point where no memory is sitting idle.

How do I use this script? There are multiple ways.

First, you can preload your whole home directory on boot.

#!/bin/sh

if [ ! -f "/tmp/$USER-home-precache" ]; then
     touch -f "/tmp/$USER-home-precache"
     precache "$HOME"
fi

Add this command to your autostart on login. or alternatively just put:

precache /home/<yourusername> &

in your system’s /etc/rc.local.

Also, when you’re about to work on something in few minutes (like launching a game or starting a big compilation), you can precache relevant directories to make the game load and work faster.

#shell #tool