Stumbled over this wonderful commit to the tree earlier today.
In short, it allows you to dump pagecache/dentries/inodes for profiling stuff in the system. It's present in kernels newer than 2.6.16.
Cut from the docs:To free pagecache: echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches To free dentries and inodes: echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches To free pagecache, dentries and inodes: echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches As this is a non-destructive operation and dirty objects are not freeable, the user should run `sync' first.