First, at the commandline, try running the utility "free" and note the results. (You might want to use "sync" first as BruceB suggests later, though it works without that as it happens).
Now enter the following command and afterwords run "free" again:
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echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
System seems to be just as responsive so perhaps it would be good to do this automatically at boot time?
It would certainly be excellent propaganda for new users who first run "free" to see how much memory their system is using immediately after booting. The results give me a lot of "comfort" on my old 256 MB RAM machine anyway, and it seems that I don't start filling up swap quite as quickly.
In fact there doesn't seem to be any major problem running the above command every now and then when using, for example, Seamonkey or Firefox web browser (though I imagine it will have some temporary effect on system responsiveness in terms of the benefits of cache - not that I'm qualitatively noticing anything negative).