Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.6 and 5.0 introduced /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches, which allows the pagecache and slabcache to be cleared on demand.
To free the pagecache:
# sync; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
To free dentries and inodes:
# sync; echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
To free pagecache, dentries and inodes:
# sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
It is recommended that sync be run prior to passing the values to /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches. Enabling drop_caches can cause deadlock if the system is under heavy memory and I/O load. It is not recommended to use this feature on system experiencing heavy load.