So I bought a new SSD the other day. After reading about SSD issues with SWAP partitions i decided to investigate further.
I found out you can use something called zram.
The zram module creates RAM based block devices named /dev/zram<id> (<id> = 0, 1, ...). Pages written to these disks are compressed and stored in memory itself. These disks allow very fast I/O and compression provides good amounts of memory savings.
Zram actually creates a loopback device which is stored in ram. It can be used for SWAP (vritual memory partitions); Storing cache files for web servers; storing static files; and many other things!
The cool thing is that it's now built-in as a Linux module!
Let's start b y using it as a swap replacement:
Remove swap from or place it into a #
sudo vim /etc/fstab
Put the following in /etc/init/zramswap.conf
description "Initializes zram swaping" start on runlevel [2345] stop on runlevel [!2345] pre-start script # load dependency modules modprobe zram num_devices=2 # initialize the devices using 512 ram each echo 536870912 > /sys/block/zram0/disksize echo 536870912> /sys/block/zram1/disksize # Creating swap filesystems mkswap /dev/zram0 mkswap /dev/zram1 # Switch the swaps on swapon -p 5 /dev/zram0 swapon -p 5 /dev/zram1 end script post-stop script # Switching off swap swapoff /dev/zram0 swapoff /dev/zram1 rmmod zram end script
Then run
sudo start zramswap
Or as an alternative change swappiness
vim /etc/sysctl.conf
/vm.swappiness and change its value as desired. If vm.swappiness does not exist, add it to the end of the file like so:
vm.swappiness=10
or install zram swap from ubuntu launchpad..
Now you won't have a physical SWAP partition anymore, only a virtual one. This is best used with 8GB RAM or more.
It's sometimes a little slower but hey, that's the memory compression working:D
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