If you’re not aware of what preload is, it’s a command line application that allows you to add files to ram, so they can be accessed faster by the applications that need them.
It seems to work well for what I’m using it for, which is to run games from slower storage devices, but there doesn’t seem to be any documentation for a proper way to remove the files once they’ve been added to ram. What I’ve been doing is to just use htop to terminate the preload command, but I feel like this is not intended at all. Is there a better way to remove these files?
I should mention that while trying to search for a solution myself, I did see gopreload mentioned a few times. I would try this out myself, but there’s no proper installation instructions, at least not any I could find that work in Linux Mint.
My understanding is the kernel will remove them if it needs the ram, so there is no need unless it’s for security reasons.
When you say “remove”, do you mean completely remove or move them to swap/zswap/zram, depending on what the system has enabled?
Cached files are freeable so the kernel will drop them instead of sending them to swap.
And I’m pretty sure zram is just a swap device in RAM so should follow the same rules.