Swap but better it behave mostly like actual ram and fast too, not as fast as actual ram but still way faster than swap I can open 5 browser tabs one of them playing a video while compiling a software I don’t feel my system slow down at all
zram, formerly called compcache, is a Linux kernel module for creating a compressed block device in RAM, i.e. a RAM disk with on-the-fly disk compression. The block device created with zram can then be used for swap or as a general-purpose RAM disk. The two most common uses for zram are for the storage of temporary files (/tmp) and as a swap device.
I have a mini PC that has been barreling through NVMe disks but Alpine Linux’ “usb” install mode just wasn’t great either. So I use a “sys” (traditional install) on an NVMe disk but have directories like /var/log, /tmp, etc. on Zstandard compressed zram disks. It’s been pretty fantastic honestly.
What is zram?
Swap but better it behave mostly like actual ram and fast too, not as fast as actual ram but still way faster than swap I can open 5 browser tabs one of them playing a video while compiling a software I don’t feel my system slow down at all
I always confuse ZRAM and ZSwap. From my understanding ZRAM is the better one and Zswap is kinda outmoded.
It turns into a rabbit hole every time I gotta reference it! Lol
It’s a Linux feature to compress some of your memory and then store it in a RAM disk. For systems with limited memory, it makes it go further.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram
I have a mini PC that has been barreling through NVMe disks but Alpine Linux’ “usb” install mode just wasn’t great either. So I use a “sys” (traditional install) on an NVMe disk but have directories like
/var/log,/tmp, etc. on Zstandard compressed zram disks. It’s been pretty fantastic honestly.