Zswap: Compressed Swap Caching For Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Zswap: Compressed Swap Caching For Linux

Published to the Linux kernel mailing list were a set of patches to provide a new feature called Zswap for lightweight compressed swap caching...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI1MDM

[Vadi]

This seems like a very solid idea for HDDs, given how swap IO completely kills a desktop Linux-based OS. Reducing the time would be an improvement.

Benchmarks - http://ibm.co/VCgHvM

[MaxToTheMax]

Funny how these things work out. Earlier today, I was thinking that compressing swapped data before actually writing it to the swap device might reduce the demand on the HDD's throughput and provide a marginal performance gain.

Now I feel silly. This is obviously a much better idea.

Of course, I haven't had a swap partition configured on my computer for a couple of years now. I'd much rather suffer the occasional OOM crash instead of frequent lag caused by swapping.

[schmidtbag]

kinda ironic, because isnt one of the perks about compressing data that it takes up a lot of ram and CPU power in favor of faster loading and smaller disk consumption? anyways, while I'm sure there's some huge technical detail I'm not aware of, I think this kind of thing came a few years too late. RAM is really cheap nowadays, I'd rather buy another GB or 2 than use a swap partition.

[ryszardzonk]

RAM is really cheap nowadays, I'd rather buy another GB or 2 than use a swap partition.

Ram is cheap for a new PCs and if one has in his possesion machine that has few years than it might be quite a different story especially if place where place one lives has GDP much lower than US or Western Europe therefore IMHO it is never to late for this kind of development. Besides who is not to say that in 5 years one would not need 10 times more RAM for basic work like to display some new 3D desktop, manufactures use some excuse to increase prices of parts like it was with HDDs and flooding and it would make You think again about Zswap...

[oibaf]

RAM may be cheap and you may want to add some more RAM, but that's not the point. Even if you could add RAM you can still use a compressed swap device that can improve performance.