zRam and Swapspace

[Liam Proven]

So, just for the experiment, I tried configuring a 1GB RAM VM with
both zRam (compressed swap in RAM) and swapspace (on-demand swapfiles
in /var so you don't need a swap partition).

It seemed to work fine. I loaded Firefox with a ton of image tabs,
plus LibreOffice, the GIMP, VLC, Evince, System Monitor and watched
the swap gradually climb until zRam's half a gig of "virtual" virtual
memory (IYSWIM) was exhausted, at which point it started creating
swapfiles - one of 216MB followed by one of 270MB.

System performance gradually degraded, as you might expect. Eventually
System Monitor froze up and then Firefox, but I suspect that if I had
given them long enough, they'd have recovered as they were swapped
back in.

The only snag: trying to hibernate, it did it happily, but when the VM
rebooted, I got a cold-boot rather than a recovery from hibernation.

But if you don't want hibernation - and I don't, not on desktops -
then the combination seems to work well for slightly low-memory
machines.

I'd say that if you don't want or need hibernation support, there
doesn't seem to be much need for a dedicated swap partition any more.

--
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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