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zRam and Swapspace
May. 18th, 2013 05:56 pmSo, 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.
[Techie details: Mint 14, 32-bit, both Cinnamon and Maté desktops, fully up-to-date. 1GB RAM, 8GB VHD, a single ext2 partition for / and no swap partition. Running under the latest VirtualBox under the latest Ubuntu 64-bit, 3D graphics enabled (for Cinnamon's benefit).]
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.
[Techie details: Mint 14, 32-bit, both Cinnamon and Maté desktops, fully up-to-date. 1GB RAM, 8GB VHD, a single ext2 partition for / and no swap partition. Running under the latest VirtualBox under the latest Ubuntu 64-bit, 3D graphics enabled (for Cinnamon's benefit).]
