hoytech/vmtouch

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

1951 stars · 223 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

vmtouch is a portable command-line utility for learning about and controlling the file system cache of Unix and Unix-like systems. It reports which files and pages are resident in memory, lets you load or evict files from cache, and can lock files into memory with mlock so the OS cannot evict them.

Use cases

• check how much of a directory or file is currently in the page cache
• lock a file into memory so the OS won't evict it
• evict a file from the file system cache
• warm the cache for batch or cron jobs
• keep a hot-standby file server's files resident in memory
• maintain a soft quota of cache usage
• plot filesystem cache usage over time
• preserve a virtual memory profile when failing over servers

When to choose

• you need to inspect or control the Unix page cache from the command line
• you want to pin files into physical memory for predictable latency on databases or file servers
• you need a small, dependency-free C tool that runs across Unix-like platforms
• you are tuning or debugging cache behavior for batch jobs or hot-standby setups

When to avoid

• you are on Windows or another non-Unix platform
• you need application-level cache management rather than OS page cache control
• you want a long-running daemon with automatic cache policies instead of an on-demand CLI

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

cli caching file-system monitoring developer-tools developer-tools operating-systems performance files bsd cli page-cache virtual-memory mlock cache-eviction cache-warming memory-management system-administration posix cache-diagnostics command-line linux macos

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For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="hoytech/vmtouch")