[mythtv-users] file to flash

[Daryl McDonald]

On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 9:08 AM, Simon Hobson <linux at thehobsons.co.uk> wrote:
> Daryl McDonald wrote:
>>Furthermore I'm hoping there is a better way to move the file than
>>dragging and dropping, because each time I've done this I end up using
>>7.8 gb's of ran and 3.4 gb's of swap until I reboot...very sluggish!
>
> Used, or just cached ?
> If you just look at the output from top (for example), then the "free" memory doesn't inlcude memory that's used for cache. By default, pretty well all systems (not just Linux) will use all available RAM for cache. This does **NOT** mean that it stops being available for other uses - "clean" cache will be dropped if the memory is needed for soemthing else (dirty cache would get written sooner or later and hence be droppable, or if needed now will be flushed before being dropped).
>
> So if you start with (say) 2G of free RAM, then copy a 5G file (none of which you've recently read or written), you'll see that the amount of memory consumed by cache goes up and your free memory goes down. Typically the free memory will go down to "not a lot" and the chace will increase in size (in this case by 2G which was all the free memory you have prior to the copy).
>
> On Linux systems you can do "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" (this tells the system to flush all dirty pages in the cache, then clear all thebuffers and caches) and you should see the cache size drop to very little and you'll get your free memory back.
>
>
> If you do get what you seem to describe then there is something very wrong with your system. I wonder if the file manager you are using is making an in-memory copy of the whole file while it's copying it ?
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File manager I'm using? All I do is get two home folder windows open,
Source (mythtv, recordings) and target (drive E, or Wherever) then
drag and drop from one to the other. I'm looking into Eric's
suggestion to set up a user job to target the first available
unmountable drive.