Ubuntu – How to use a compressed ramdisk (ramzswap)? Huge speed gain

10.04ramswap

Since I don't use my laptop's CD-drive I want to put a small (8 GB) SSD into the CD-drive slot (I'll use a caddy similar to this one). I want to use compressed btrfs on the SSD and put all the data on the big HDD.
I want to avoid unnecessary spin-ups. I want the system to be fast… I want to minimize wearing of the SSD.

What tricks are there to use a compressed ramdisk wisely (using but not overusing it)?
How to enable it? What values are sensible?

Also see this post (I split my questions up).

Best Answer

For Natty and up just use zramswap. I've already baked sane defaults and automatic setup in there. In fact, it adapts to your system automatically and I really doubt you'll achieve better results by manual setup.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to permanently enable compressed ram swap? What version to use

There's now a PPA that installs a proper Upstart script for enabling zram at boot-time. It chooses the correct size and number of compressed swap devices for your system.

https://launchpad.net/~shnatsel/+archive/zram

RAM – How to Use zRam

Like Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff was quoted in that blog post, this package installs a script to run it as a service. The script automatically configures itself and the service starts up automatically. There is no further configuration needed. The service can be manually controlled via:

sudo service zramswap start|stop|status|restart|reload|force-reload

If you open the deb package with file roller you can see that only two files are installed:

/etc/init/zramswap.conf
/etc/init.d/zramswap

Along with some documentation files. The DEBIAN directory contains package meta data and commands to initialize the service. Thats all there is in the package. The corresponding devices are named after this scheme: /dev/zram[0-9]

Have you installed it via PPA? I recommend doing that.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to permanently enable compressed ram swap? What version to use

RAM – How to Use zRam

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