Craig Sanders wrote:
i've taken to using zram as my primary swap device in recent months [...] like tmpfs, zram doesn't actually use any RAM unless there's data swapped to it. so you can allocate, e.g., 4GB out of 8GB RAM to zram without worrying about wasting memory.
I've been ambivalent enough about zram to not bother with it yet[0]. I take it you're capping it at 50% of your 8GB? What's your typical RAM breakdown look like (free -m output)? I assume you'd have a non-negligible amount of zlib CPU churn when paging out to zram -- is that noticable? I suppose it is, but only when you have pegged BOTH CPU and RAM. [0] I had enough bad swap thrash experiences under 2.6 that I've run without swap ever since, relying on the OOM killer if the GUI browser decides to be extra stupid. Incidentally, I've NEVER run a personal computer with more than 1GB RAM (of which the onboard GPU gets about a quarter), so it IS possible -- just not for WIMPs :-) (My racked kit of course, get gobs of RAM -- to cache filesystem metadata, if nothing else.) total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 728 576 152 0 115 353 -/+ buffers/cache: 106 622 Swap: 0 0 0