I have been setting up Zram, Swap, Swappiness and EasyOOM daemon on 16gb ram boxes, or lower. Someone asked me about 32gb of ram, or more, and I’m unsure. Wondering if others have experimented with this!
been testing this quite a lot for star citizen which regularly sees 20-40 GB use. zram is the easiest solution to avoiding OOM Killer by a long shot. zswap was swapping over 100 GB to disk cumulative throughout the day and still oom killing the game. zswap is also a pain in the ass to configure for the lay user and harder to get human readable stats. I don’t want lay users going anywhere near their bootloader but zswap is all kernel command line to make permanent changes
Yeah, I have 96gb and I still assign a zram swap, just in case. I also have a zram tmp, and a zram for my portage compilation dir (I use Gentoo). The latter gets the most use.
My workstation has 48 GB RAM with 50% allocation allowed to zram, no disk swapping. It works just fine. Once I use up the majority of my RAM, it kicks in the same way it would on any other system with less RAM.
Shouldn’t total ram amount always be powers of 2 (forgot the reason exactly) ? It sounds like 32 +16 wouldn’t be ideal ? I remember that from my early days, but maybe it has changed ?
That is correct, IIRC, the mismatch does limit how much of it can run in dual-channel. Even if a single stick is natively 24 or 48 GB, there is additional strain on the memory controller. It is the way it is on my setup since I had planned an upgrade to a full 64 GB and was holding off until a good deal on the remaining 32 GB kit, which will never come unless the AI bubble bursts.
zram makes sense if you do not have swap.
zswap is probably enabled by default in most distros. It compresses cold pages on the fly so that they’re ready to quickly get swapped in and out.
I do hit the swap partition occasionally on my 32GB systems.
It doesn’t really kick in until you have proper pressure. I want my swap partition for hibernation, anyway.
i don’t see a lot of swap use on my systems, but i do have zswap backed by a swap partition on a couple of them; otherwise i generally i just use a basic swap partition on most everything.
basic systems (browser, email, light docs/media use) i set up for others that are using ext4 might use a swapfile instead if it was the default for whatever distribution i used for it.
