[nullindividual]

That's certain one of the statements of all time.

All major OSes compress memory at this point. I'd be curious to see how OoM acts on macOS -- I've seen it on Windows [NT4] and Linux over the years. I've not seen an OS handle it as well as NT does/did.

[Shekelphile]

> All major OSes compress memory at this point.

zswap won't compress pages until they're swapped to disk, so essentially only once you've run out of memory to use and have begun experiencing the horrid performance degradation that comes from swapping to disk. you can use zram instead and put swappiness to a high value so the kernel aggressively swaps pages to the fake swap device made by zram, but then you lose the ability to have on-disk compressed swap pages.

i'm surprised that more work hasn't been done to fix this because memory management on linux is clearly lagging behind and affects a lot more than the minority of people using desktop linux systems, every android phone ships with 1.5x-2x more RAM than the equivalent iphone and performs worse when a bunch of apps are running in the background because of the poor memory management.

[amluto]

It’s like an analogy from high school. 1 is to 8GB as 2 is to 16GB. See, they’re analogous.

[jauntywundrkind]

Do they? What did nt4 do that was so great?

Linux zram seems effective for marking some memory as compressed swap. Alas it doesn't play well with zswap, reportedly, which lets real swap drives also be compressed. But should be useful in many scenarios to quickly switch between compressed memories in a wide number of cases.

[JohnFen]

Does Debian do this by default? If so, can I disable it for a performance increase?

[ac29]

No, but should you want to enable it, you can install systemd-zram-generator.

See also: https://github.com/systemd/zram-generator

As someone else mentioned, for many cases this will be a performance increase, not decrease. Compressing infrequently used memory frees up more memory to be used for filesystem caching among other things.

[stouset]

Compressed memory is a performance increase. CPUs are fast.

[JohnFen]

Depends on what sort of performance you're optimizing for, does it not?

[cmrx64]

There might be an energy hit… but there are a LOT of compute cycles available between cache fills: https://www.blosc.org/pages/blosc-in-depth/