Samuel Sieb wrote:
See, this is a clear indication that you don't understand what it
is
doing and weren't listening to the various people trying to explain it.
It is definitely not a placebo. I gave zram 5G out of the 12G I have
and my laptop is performing way better now. It's not thrashing the disk
(SSD) every time I switch desktops or windows.
If you are always running out of RAM with 12 GiB, you need to look into the
applications you are running. I have a notebook with 4 GiB RAM and 8 GiB
swap and it is usable with Fedora (KDE Spin), Plasma, and some applications.
Are you running only standard desktop applications or some memory-intensive
simulations or something?
Due to the number and size of applications I'm running, I
normally have to
close Thunderbird when I want to run Chrome. But now I can start Chrome
up with no problem.
Wow. I am running Trojitá (IMAP mail) and Falkon (web browser) right now,
plus Konversation (IRC) and KNode (NNTP, in which I am writing this message
right now), and KSensors reports 2096 MiB of RAM and 0 MiB of swap used. So
what is using so much RAM? Are Thunderbird and Chrome so memory-hungry or is
it the other applications you are running? (Which ones?)
Swap is never used as buffer or cache, that doesn't even make
sense.
Buffer is storing data before writing it to disk and cache is keeping
hot data somewhere with fast access. Why do you use so much swap on
your servers? The linear correlation with RAM is an obsolete idea and
was only somewhat valid when memory sizes were smaller. If you're using
any significant fraction of that swap space, your server is in trouble.
He actually has much less swap set up than I do. Not even half his RAM. I
just stick to twice the RAM, because taking 16 GiB away from a 3 TB RAID1 to
make room for a 32 GiB RAID0 swap is not going to make any practical
difference.
Kevin Kofler