Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices

• tal@lemmy.today ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram

  zram, formerly called compcache, is a Linux kernel module for creating a compressed block device in RAM, i.e. a RAM disk with on-the-fly disk compression. The block device created with zram can then be used for swap or as general-purpose RAM disk. The two most common uses for zram are for the storage of temporary files (/tmp) and as a swap device. Initially, zram had only the latter function, hence the original name “compcache” (“compressed cache”). Unlike swap, zram only uses 0.1% of the maximum size of the disk when not in use.[1]

  Open-source RAM is better.

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  • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Using a RAM drive for swap?

    Am I misunderstanding the point of swap?

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    • tal@lemmy.today ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It’s a compressed RAM drive being used as swap backing. The kernel’s already got the functionality to have multiple tiers of priority for storage; this just leverages that.

      Kinda like RAM Doubler of yesteryear.

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      • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Zram on Linux is awesome! I’ve used it heavily in both memory constrained systems and systems with 16+GB of memory running very poorly optimized code

        Running for example, Cities Skylines with 40GB of mods can easily lead to running memory usage being 20-30GB uncompressed. With zram I can load that same mod load out on a 16GB laptop with no swap and it won’t crash where it would crash for being out of memory before.

        Another example is Proxmox with over-provisioned lxc containers. Since it’s still the kernel scheduler running all of the processes in those containers zram can keep them all running nicely even when a heavily modded Minecraft server gets a few players online and starts pushing past memory limits, where before I set it up I’d have some of the Minecraft server processes get killed to free up memory resources without warning or proper logging by Minecraft

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• Little8Lost@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I mostly get mine from downloadmoreram.com

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