I can't answer for everyone, but I can tell you why I have a cron job dropping my cache every several minutes: The application I develop consumes most of the r

I can't answer for everyone, but I can tell you why I have a cron job dropping my cache every several minutes: The application I develop consumes most of the ram on my machine when running, and takes several minutes to rebuild and start up to begin with. When most of my memory is being used for the cache, this process takes several minutes longer, because I'm making millions upon millions of calls for more memory -- and each one has to get some of that cached memory back for itself. If I simply drop the cache all at once, every minute, it takes a split second. If I shrink it over a million increments, it takes around a minute. Even typing that I feel I must be doing something wrong; and yet, it worked.