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> It solves the problem that a e.g. browser eats all your memory. It doesn't solve that. You get a little bit more headroom, but that's it. Not much ram is con

> It solves the problem that a e.g. browser eats all your memory. It doesn't solve that. You get a little bit more headroom, but that's it. Not much ram is considered compressible anyway. On my Mac I'm barely reaching 10% of compressed memory anyway, so it doesn't make that much difference.

noisem4ker 3y ago
Current RAM usage from my Windows 10 dev machine, as reported by Task Manager: > In use: 18028 MB > In use, compressed: 2718 MB > Compressed memory stores an estimated 9013 MB of data, saving the system 6294 MB of memory. That's not a small amount.
jowea 3y ago
My experience is that zram saves quite a bit. I have another old laptop with 4GB where it's essential. Maybe it differs by program type? NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT /dev/zram0 lzo-rle 15,6G 1,9G 248,6M 418M 16 [SWAP]
- viraptor 3y ago
  Yup, it will depend on your workload a lot. Worth testing of course!
ltbarcly3 3y ago
> Not much ram is considered compressible anyway. What are you basing this on? Things in RAM are often very very compressible, usually between 3:1 and 4:1.
- viraptor 3y ago
  Depends on what things are in your ram. Code/configuration/simple data structures compress nicely. Images/videos/ML-models don't.
  - ltbarcly3 3y ago
    > Depends on what things are in your ram. No offense, but you are being a very precise in defense but very broad in your (in general incorrect) claim. The representation of an image sitting in memory will be a bitmap array, and for sure that will compress quite well. Video data as well but any decompressed frames are so transient I agree they won't benefit. ML-models don't compress well, but training data certainly does. If you put aside mapping already compressed or non-compressable data into memory, all the rest of the things ram is used for can be compressed. Day to day you will have a lot of memory allocated that can be compressed. Most memory in use right now on most computers is compressible.
therealmarv 3y ago
yes, it's not the ultimate solution but if your machine behaves in 98% of cases snappy and does not slow down vs. let's say only 70% of cases then that's a huge usability difference. Sometimes you just need a little headroom on top and not more. As some user point out it really depends on the workload and data etc. Browsers are a good example because in my experience browser cache can be compressed quite good.

noisem4ker 3y ago

Current RAM usage from my Windows 10 dev machine, as reported by Task Manager: > In use: 18028 MB > In use, compressed: 2718 MB > Compressed memory stores an estimated 9013 MB of data, saving the system 6294 MB of memory. That's not a small amount.

jowea 3y ago

My experience is that zram saves quite a bit. I have another old laptop with 4GB where it's essential. Maybe it differs by program type? NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT /dev/zram0 lzo-rle 15,6G 1,9G 248,6M 418M 16 [SWAP]

viraptor 3y ago
Yup, it will depend on your workload a lot. Worth testing of course!

ltbarcly3 3y ago

> Not much ram is considered compressible anyway. What are you basing this on? Things in RAM are often very very compressible, usually between 3:1 and 4:1.

viraptor 3y ago
Depends on what things are in your ram. Code/configuration/simple data structures compress nicely. Images/videos/ML-models don't.
- ltbarcly3 3y ago
  > Depends on what things are in your ram. No offense, but you are being a very precise in defense but very broad in your (in general incorrect) claim. The representation of an image sitting in memory will be a bitmap array, and for sure that will compress quite well. Video data as well but any decompressed frames are so transient I agree they won't benefit. ML-models don't compress well, but training data certainly does. If you put aside mapping already compressed or non-compressable data into memory, all the rest of the things ram is used for can be compressed. Day to day you will have a lot of memory allocated that can be compressed. Most memory in use right now on most computers is compressible.

therealmarv 3y ago

yes, it's not the ultimate solution but if your machine behaves in 98% of cases snappy and does not slow down vs. let's say only 70% of cases then that's a huge usability difference. Sometimes you just need a little headroom on top and not more. As some user point out it really depends on the workload and data etc. Browsers are a good example because in my experience browser cache can be compressed quite good.