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by tyingq 1969 days ago
"Even storing items in-memory compressed sometimes is profitable"

LZ4 is one of the algorithms supported by Zram in Linux. It's fairly popular for people using things like a Raspberry PI that have a smaller amount of RAM.

2 comments

TIL about zRAM, emailed myself this config to try at work

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-enable-the-zram-...

Thanks, I just enabled it. We will see. :)
Microsoft found that compressed pages were always faster, because added by de-/compression was less than the latency to disk (given a sufficiently fast compression algorithm). As a bonus, it's also faster to read and write compressed pages to disk (if that absolutely has to happen). Zswap is therefore enabled by default on Windows.

I configure my own kernel on Arch and Zswap is enabled by default there, too.

Microsoft's compressed pages implementation seems to work far better than zswap on Linux.

I can't quite see why - perhaps the logic to decide which pages to compress is different, or there is too much code in the swap subsystem that slows down the compression/decompression process...

Pages as in the 8K (for example) data structure used to store portions of files on disk, or pages as in text files? I'm assuming the former but I am not very good with file system internals
Memory pages, typically 4kb.
Thanks