"le9" Strives To Make Linux Very Usable On Systems With Small Amounts Of RAM

[ssokolow]

He's using ram as compressed swap (zram), which is a best method to speed up the system. This is enabled in Fedora by default for example.
Tuning swappiness to 200 has also its effect, and this is stated in the article you've linked.
Sorry, but it seems that's you who don't understand the topic. Reread the article you've linked.

...plus, do you really want to be having swap on disk now that your PC probably has an SSD in it, which has a limited number of wear cycles?

[pal666]

wait a second, he says that to protect from thrashing you need to swap more? i.e. all those people disabling swap were wrong? what a surprise(not really)

[pal666]

...plus, do you really want to be having swap on disk now that your PC probably has an SSD in it, which has a limited number of wear cycles?

it would be stupid to not use ssd for most demanding work, wouldn't it?

[pal666]

I fail to see how this hack is better than setting swappiness to 200 (which biases reclaim heavily towards swap instead of page cache eviction), page-cluster to 0 (no read-ahead), and using zram with zstd compression.

anything is better than wasting precious ram on zram

[rogerx]

Somebody say they have 32GB for VIM? Well I have 64GB of DDR memory for VIM.

Thank God for this patch. Only ~10 years a little too late for my 2000-2010 old hardware. Must have been using God's time plan?

[intelfx]

Really?... it all depends on the content of that tab/program. Not everything happens inside a browser you know - sometimes you need to save things as well.

Then you adjust the OOM killer score of that precious process so it won't be first in line to get killed.

Either way, killing some processes is obviously preferable to locking up the whole system in endless thrashing (which is equivalent to killing all processes).

[intelfx]

...plus, do you really want to be having swap on disk now that your PC probably has an SSD in it, which has a limited number of wear cycles?

Yes, the wear capacity of modern (good quality) SSDs is obscenely large anyway, the drive will be morally obsolete long before you wear it out even with constant swapping.

[t.s.]

Odroid N2, XU4, C4, Raspberry pi 3, 3+, 4, Nanopi M2, Vim{n}{l} etc will benefit much from this. Thanks hakavlad

[microcode]

How well does this improve swap thrashing on larger memory sizes? I have a workstations with 64-256GiB of memory, and sometimes even these run out.

[hakavlad]

wait a second, he says that to protect from thrashing you need to swap more? i.e. all those people disabling swap were wrong? what a surprise(not really)

- You can get thrashing with swap space.
- You can get thrashing without swap space.

To minimize thrashing:
- Use the kernel with le9 patch and high vm.clean_min_kbytes value (prevent cache starvation);
- Use noswap or swap on zram (do not use disk to swap).