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New Patches For Linux's Zswap Show Major Improvements (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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The graph is on a logarithmic scale btw

Configuration Before series (ms) With series (ms)
1 vCPU 22.3 (21.6-22.6) 0.97 (0.72-1.4)
8 vCPUs 314 (97-2542) 7.0 (5.0-98)
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[–] 3 points 1 month ago (7 children)

But it will reduce your SSD writes, so that's nice to improve SSD lifetime a bit.

This, assuming you have a swap partition, right? I'm running with 64 GB without any swap. No issues while gaming AAA titles. Without swap there should be no wear on the SSD, right?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    Here is an article In defence of swap: common misconceptions by Chris Down from 2018. It has a "tl;dr" section with 7 points, if you just want have a quick look.

    I setup a swap file instead a partition, it's just more flexible, but same concept. The swappiness settings cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness is at "60" with a total size of 64 GiB on a very fast NVME SSD. If this was a slow HDD, then any writes and reads would be much more noticeably slow. I had it disabled in the past too and didn't notice any difference. The only difference to me would be, if the system RAM fills up, then the system could freeze and maybe crash. Or the system will unload applications to make room, and it could hit randomly an important app. Imagine a program has a memory leak.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    If you really don't want any swap then you can use zRAM. I've heard even just a little bit of swap space (even zRAM) can help a lot. Note that when you set up zRAM, if you set it to 16GB that does not mean it will cap at 16GB of RAM usage, it means it will cap at 16GB of data pre-compression and its actual RAM usage will likely be closer to 6GB when full. And when it's empty it doesn't use any RAM.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Gaming isn't heavy on ram. You need fast ram not lots of ram for gaming. Lots of ram helps with heavy workloads, compiling and software development and stuff. Playing a game only needs the recommended amount for that game, then as fast as you can get so as not to be a bottleneck for your CPU.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (2 children)

    Alright, well, that's not really addressing the question. Without a swap partition, you shouldn't get much wear on your SSD, right?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Sorry, I may have misunderstood. No, if you don't use your SSD as a swap device, you won't use or wear your SSD with swap. With 64gb ram and just playing AAA games, you won't have much need for any kind of swap. If you decide to do any heavy workloads that are heavy on ram requirements, zswap is an option to keep swap off your SSD and thus prevent wear on the disk. However if you are very limited on ram for your workload, zswap might not provide enough space, then traditional SSD swap will be the final option.

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