On Oct 12, 2018, at 12:25, Gordan Bobic <gordan@redsleeve.org> wrote:

Because swapping to SD card is slow, swapping to zram is fast, and zram only takes about 1/2 of the RAM that it provides.
It's basically RAM compression.
It works and makes a positive difference, even without exceedingly slow storage.

Right, but that begs a larger question: why swap *at all*? The whole point of virtual memory in the first place was as a performance hack to allow the processor to see a larger memory space than can be accommodated by core RAM alone. For certain workloads, in situations where one has a mass storage device upon which to place the swapped memory pages, this makes sense; but when the ‘storage device’ is the very core RAM that one is attempting to ‘extend’, it becomes a completely self-defeating exercise; complexity for the sake of complexity.

Cheers!


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