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Use CachyOS-style ZRAM on Ubuntu? (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by iturnedintoanewt@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Hi guys! I'm a bit tired that my system sometimes completely becomes unresponsive while running things that could fill up the memory. I have 32GB of RAM, a bit of a swap file in my SSD (I think something like 5GB swap), but this clearly isn't cutting it. I was having a few browser windows opened, a handbrake encoding that was paused and decided to open Death Stranding 2, which is optimized to take around 5-6GB of RAM. And the system became once more so unresponsive that I had to literally reset it, after 5mins of nothing. I'd like to implement in my Ubuntu-based distro what they have in CachyOS. I'm not exactly sure, but I think it's a ZRAM-based swap partition? Something like 1 or 2GB commited to compressed virtual memory in RAM? Seems this works much better when things are close to getting dicey...how would I go about doing what they use in CachyOS? Is there any easy to follow guide?

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[-] Ordoviz@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 day ago

Use systemd-zram-generator. The process is explain in the DebianWiki and the ArchWiki and this random blog, but it boils down to just a few commands you need to run:

$ apt install systemd-zram-generator
$ sudoedit /etc/systemd/zram-generator.conf
[zram0]
zram-size = min(ram, 8192)
compression-algorithm = zstd
$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload && sudo systemctl start systemd-zram-setup@zram0.service

You can tweak the settings above. Fedora recommends using zram-size = min(ram, 8192), which would correspond to 8GB ZRAM in your case. CachyOS uses a less conservative config with zram-size = ram.

To confirm that zram is working, run zramctl. It should print something like

NAME       ALGORITHM DISKSIZE   DATA  COMPR  TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 zstd            8G 430.8M 137.6M 142.9M         [SWAP]

See also Improving system responsiveness under low-memory conditions.

[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Systemd absorbed zram now.

And no, you don't need a background service for this.

# modprobe zram
# zramctl /dev/zram0 --algorithm zstd --size "$(($(grep -Po 'MemTotal:\s*\K\d+' /proc/meminfo)/2))KiB"
# mkswap -U clear /dev/zram0
# swapon --discard --priority 100 /dev/zram0
[-] mech@feddit.org 5 points 1 day ago

Systemd is a great operating system, all it lacks is a kernel.

[-] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 day ago

Just like GNU coreutils.

[-] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

What happens when you reboot?

[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago

Using a udev rule

The example below describes how to set up swap on zram automatically at boot with a single udev rule and an fstab entry. No additional packages are needed to make this work.

[-] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

I'd take a single file config. It's cleaner and easier to see what's going on.

You may not need an additional package, but often they're convenient.

this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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