Title is a bit misleading, and I think intentionally, which kinda irks me. It isn’t a 400x speedup of RAM by means of compression. If I understood correctly, it’s 400x speedup compared to disk read for swap.
Please correct me if I’m wrong here. I’d love some positive news from the IT world that isn’t depressive. (edit: I implied this wasn’t. It is. I’m just not sure of the actual impact)
It’s a little better than your read. The ~400x speedup is in comparison to using ZRAM, which, in very brief terms, compresses memory by creating an in-memory compressed block device and assigning that as your swap space. So your “swap” is actually a compressed chunk of RAM, not on disk.
This was significantly slower than normal memory access because page faulting when looking up something in memory then fetching from swap was, itself, expensive. Regardless of how fast that swap was. When your swap is on a storage device that overhead is comparatively tiny, but when it’s just another chunk of memory suddenly it’s what you’re spending most of your time on.
Fuck yea, RAM swap? I bought both my laptop and desktop when RAM was cheap, and got more memory than I needed. I can safely allocate like 12GB to CRAM!
The win from CRAM is that it is not swap, and operates using mostly normal RAM semantics. If it works as advertised you should be able to allocate most (all?!) of your RAM as CRAM.
Title is a bit misleading, and I think intentionally, which kinda irks me. It isn’t a 400x speedup of RAM by means of compression. If I understood correctly, it’s 400x speedup compared to disk read for swap.
Please correct me if I’m wrong here. I’d love some positive news from the IT world that isn’t depressive. (edit: I implied this wasn’t. It is. I’m just not sure of the actual impact)
It’s a little better than your read. The ~400x speedup is in comparison to using ZRAM, which, in very brief terms, compresses memory by creating an in-memory compressed block device and assigning that as your swap space. So your “swap” is actually a compressed chunk of RAM, not on disk.
This was significantly slower than normal memory access because page faulting when looking up something in memory then fetching from swap was, itself, expensive. Regardless of how fast that swap was. When your swap is on a storage device that overhead is comparatively tiny, but when it’s just another chunk of memory suddenly it’s what you’re spending most of your time on.
Fuck yea, RAM swap? I bought both my laptop and desktop when RAM was cheap, and got more memory than I needed. I can safely allocate like 12GB to CRAM!
The win from CRAM is that it is not swap, and operates using mostly normal RAM semantics. If it works as advertised you should be able to allocate most (all?!) of your RAM as CRAM.