Use a Flash Drive or an SD card as Ram?

It's like zipping a file - you compress the data to fit more stuff into the same space. If your cpu is fast enough (and most are) the compression/decompression is transparent so it just looks like you have more RAM than you really do.
 


It's like zipping a file - you compress the data to fit more stuff into the same space. If your cpu is fast enough (and most are) the compression/decompression is transparent so it just looks like you have more RAM than you really do.
exactly. basically its a tit4tat ordeal... me likey
 
It's like zipping a file - you compress the data to fit more stuff into the same space. If your cpu is fast enough (and most are) the compression/decompression is transparent so it just looks like you have more RAM than you really do.
& tbh it didnt really do much to my cpu. checked the monitor app thingy an only thing thats really using anyhting is the gnome display
 
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& tbh it didnt really do shit to my cpu. checked the monitor app thingy an only thing thats really using anyhting is the gnome display
I use to run older desktops with 4.0 GB of memory and dual core processors and had a good Linux experience.

One thing to understand about some of the speed tweaks that are suggested on the forum is first off don't expect much improvement.

Okay if you research about them most say only a very slight noticeable improvement.

Is the improvement noticeable to the eye most likely not so don't expect to turn your family car into a hot rod by suggested tweaks.


As in your case the Gnome DE is the first cause of slow performance and that's changeable imo.

Don't take this the wrong way the Celeron processor is not really capable of running a resource demanding DE as Gnome.

Light weight DE such as Xfce wold be the best no cash improvement that you could make.

If you're unwilling to make a change which I can understand been there done that the use it as it is so it ain't no super computer.

If the computer you have does what you need it to do the mission accomplished and life is good so rock on.

The most important thing is have fun with Linux.
 
If you are using zram - remember about one thing - most USB drives are not designed for so many writes that you will do to them :) I was using zram on a single board pc, with soldered 1Gig of RAM, and basically killed a flash drive in a month :)
 
Before you start playing around with zram...you might want to read this...
https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/ssd.html#ID8

There's a reason it's disabled by default...also have a look at swappiness too.
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My Tower has 16GB of Ram...zram is disabled as it's not needed...adding more Ram is the best and safest way to go...I have swappiness set to 20 too.
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There's a reason it's disabled by default...

That depends on the distro, I think. I think that Fedora uses zRAM by default, shipping with it enabled and operational.

I was just researching this for an article about an hour ago:


zRAM Swap device is enabled by default on Fedora.

Don't quote me on it - quote them on it. They could be mistaken.

I'd expect any Fedora clones to come with it by default, but that's just an expectation and not something I've tested.
 
In Mint it's disabled by default...as my Tower has 16GB of Ram...I have no need of it.

As they say...do so at your own risk.
m1213.gif
 
My Tower has 16GB of Ram...zram is disabled as it's not needed...adding more Ram is the best and safest way to go...I have swappiness set to 20 too.
m1213.gif
If you use hibernate then recommended swap size is RAM x 1.5
But if there is more than 16GB of ram then no swap should be used because it's waste of disk space, unless one has 1TB+ SSD and doesn't care.
 
If you use hibernate then recommended swap size is RAM x 1.5
But if there is more than 16GB of ram then no swap should be used because it's waste of disk space, unless one has 1TB+ SSD and doesn't care.

I was talking about Swappiness not Swap.
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I was talking about Swappiness not Swap.
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One of the first things I always do is check the swappiness level and set it to 10 running bare metal hard drive.

I've read when running a SSD lowest swappiness level is best although can't say for sure.

swappiness level

optimize ssd
 
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Maybe these will explain.


@InvaderSumo: The articles here discuss using usb's for swap space. This is practical, but using un-used hard drive space is more practical. The reason being that SATA is designed to be faster and more efficient than USB data transfer. Also, I personally like having usb slots open and available. I have even duct taped an SD card and USB hub to my desktop computer.

I understand you don't intend to try this, but it's still worth stating: there isn't a single desktop/laptop that will boot without the RAM occupied. (Please correct me if i am wrong)
 
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One of the first things I always do is check the swappiness level and set it to 10 running bare metal hard drive.

I've read when running a SSD lowest swappiness level is best although can't say for sure.

swappiness level

optimize ssd

I've followed that guy's advice for 5 years with my SSDs...nothing's gone wrong yet.
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If you use hibernate then recommended swap size is RAM x 1.5
But if there is more than 16GB of ram then no swap should be used because it's waste of disk space, unless one has 1TB+ SSD and doesn't care.
32 GB DDR4 here - and 64 GB of swap! Plus 'swappiness' set to 10.....

(There's method in the madness. I hibernate most nights, and this HP gets very snotty if you try to split the contents of RAM up between smaller swap areas. But then, I've got almost 5 TB of storage here as well, so disk space isn't an issue really.....that 64 GB of swap is one contiguous area on my secondary data drive, and only really gets used when hibernating.)


Mike. ;)
 

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