My MacBook constantly freezes because of using all RAM (8GB). The disk cache seems to be the cause. The command sudo purge only helps a little bit. In some older versions of OS X, my MacBook worked fine because it had (just) enough RAM for running Xcode (with big project) without constantly swapping.
This is the memory usage after compiling my project once. The memory usage of Xcode can grow few hundreds more MB after few hours of usage.
This isn't directly answering your question since I don't know of a way to disable the file cache mechanism in OSX. That being said, I can't think of a good reason WHY you would want to do so in the first place? What makes you so sure it is because of the file cache?
The file cache is a dynamic thing in that it gets larger as you do more I/O with your disk, but gets purged and shrinks as soon as an application needs RAM to get something done. What lives in the file cache is copies of recently used files with the idea that if you need them again shortly thereafter, the I/O will be much faster since it is already in RAM. While this is similar to the RAM cache function of the older MacOS, the big difference here is that it is completely dynamic and grows to make use of unused RAM in your system and will shrink as soon as ANYTHING needs RAM. In other words, it isn't locking up your memory and shouldn't be the cause of any slowdowns on your Mac.
That all being said, there is somewhat of a balance between how OSX manages your RAM. I have seen that there are small delays as things go in/out of the "compressed" state and in general the idea is that once something is compressed, it will stay there until there is a real need otherwise. The bigger cause for a delay would be if you were using swap since that is the slowest form of memory, but your screenshot even indicates 0 bytes dedicated to swap. Compression and swapping aside, I wouldn't be surprised if there is some overhead and delay as a result of shuffling all this around when all of your RAM is being utilized. However, the question might be more around what applications are freezing up when you're in this situation. Perhaps even your disk is near capacity and you're rather experiencing the fact that HFS+ is much slower when the disk is near full?
In general, you might have some short term benefit from purging or disabling the file cache, but I would hazard a guess that it would actually degrade your performance since you wouldn't get the benefit of a filesystem cache.
If sudo purge didn't help, try disabling dynamic pager, e.g.
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist
Warning: This completely disables the Mac OS X paging ability, so use it only when you've huge amount of RAM, but your Mac is still using swap files. If your system has SIP protection, you'll have to disable it first (not recommended).
You can also remove swap files manually from /private/var/vm/, e.g.
sudo rm -f /private/var/vm/swapfile*
then restart the computer.
Source: Mac Virtual Memory – What it is, the Swap Location, and How to Disable Swap
To disable memory swapping completely, set vm_compressor to 1, e.g.
sudo nvram boot-args="vm_compressor=2"
or set it to 4 to default, see the other values (from vm_pageout.h):
#define VM_PAGER_DEFAULT 0x1 /* Use default pager. */
#define VM_PAGER_COMPRESSOR_NO_SWAP 0x2 /* In-core compressor only. */
#define VM_PAGER_COMPRESSOR_WITH_SWAP 0x4 /* In-core compressor + swap backend. */
#define VM_PAGER_FREEZER_DEFAULT 0x8 /* Freezer backed by default pager.*/
#define VM_PAGER_FREEZER_COMPRESSOR_NO_SWAP 0x10 /* Freezer backed by in-core compressor only i.e. frozen data remain in-core compressed.*/
#define VM_PAGER_FREEZER_COMPRESSOR_WITH_SWAP 0x20 /* Freezer backed by in-core compressor with swap support too.*/
To check your current value, run:
sysctl vm.compressor_mode
To back to normal, delete boot args by:
sudo nvram -d boot-args
restart and reset your NVRAM.
See: vm_compressor=VM_PAGER_DEFAULT in Yosemite caused freeze when physical memory was full
