Post #487337
2026-03-01 14:44 UTC
When you open and read files from a program the OS (kernel) will typically cache part or all of those files in memory. This is to speed up subsequent reads of that file since disk access is slow.
“preload” seems to be making use of that feature.
The kernel maintains this cache and evicts (unloads) things from it as needed. You don’t need to worry about it.
Replies (1)
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@vortexal@lemmy.ml 2026-03-01 21:53
After doing some more “extreme” tests, it seems like I was wrong about how preload works. In fact, it didn’t seem to actually preload the files at all, so I’m not sure what it actually does. I ran sudo sysctl vm.drop_caches=1 to make sure that none of the game’s files were loaded and then used preload like I did yesterday, but the game still has hitching issues. This means that the game’s files were probably still loaded in RAM when I was trying it yesterday.