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

• tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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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    • tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Thanks for the added insights! I haven’t used it myself, so appreciated.

      Linux has a second, similar “compressed memory” feature called zswap. This guy has used both, and thinks that if someone is using a system with NVMe, that zswap is preferable.

      linuxblog.io/zswap-better-than-zram/

      Based on his take, zram is probably a better choice for that rotational-disk Celeron, but if you’re running Cities: Skylines on newer hardware, I’m wondering if zswap might be more advantageous.

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      • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Huh I’d never looked into that! Thank you!

        I mostly used zram because there’s an easy-peasy script in the Debian repos making it dead simple to setup and never looked deeper into it

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