#include
#include

int
main(void)
{
int fd = open(”/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches”, O_WRONLY);
if (fd == -1) return 1;
write(fd, “3\n”, 2);
close(fd);
return 0;
}

If you go this way I strongly suggest using dietlibc (http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/) as glibc’s support for static linking is incredibly half-assed these days. dietlibc will produce a binary that you can easily disassemble and inspect for safety.

talos talos_machine = NOPASSWD: /path/to/script/to/clear/cache

where the script would be owned by root to prevent modification. I used a similar setup when I need a web interface to reload firewall rules after editing.

@Anon #1: Is there a way to suppress the password prompt without compromising security? Could you point me to some documentation?

@Robert: Sure, thanks for the idea. I’ll get to it next week.

@ant: A kind soul has already written a program that does just that. (It’s listed on the notes page I linked above.) It does work, but problem is, it grinds your system to a halt for ten minutes as it does its business. The more RAM, the longer it takes. Ts is the average of 20 runs, so that’s three hours and twenty minutes just to complete one Ts. Maybe we’ll have to use it, though.

@Anon #2: Sure, I meant that we would have caught it as we landed it.

In any case, could you also test Gran Paradiso (3.0) as a comparison so we have another baseline? For hysterical reasons, even a comparison against FF2 might be interesting – I hope we actually did improve somewhere ;-)