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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Not according to the chrisdown blog post above.
What about it? I see it kicking in at least 10 GB before my RAM is full and I haven't noticed any fundamental differences between how zram works on my 48 GB workstation and my 8 GB devices. Maybe I've never had a workload that filled all 48 GB + extra zram capacity, but it's never given me an issue.
Use zswap not zram.
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 ?
There are some 24GB sticks around, same with 48GB sticks
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.
Genuinely curious: what are you doing to be needing this?
I cannot think of any modern usecase for swap a part from hybernation
Local AI can chew it up. Wasn't able to run certain jobs on 64Gb until I switched to zswap.
What kind of token per second are you getting with your model partially on disk?
I've been using lower ram machines lately, so made me curious about if people are using things like zram with 32gb+
Compiling Librewollf with a sufficient number of jobs is a great way to eat up 32GB of RAM, and the some.
Swapping will make it slower not faster, reduce jobs?
No. Most of the build jobs are fast and small. A couple take up gigabytes at a time. Swap is on SSD anyway. Its fast enough.
I also use NixOS and GuixSD. There are cases where binary caches haven't caught up with the package definition. Situations like Librewolf, LibreOffice and kernel all compiling at the same time.
Sure I could mess around with limiting jobs and build runners... Or I could just have swap, and never worry about it again.
Just a BTRFS swapfile. I'm not worried too much about performance. I rarely hit it and most of the time i don't even need it. Until I do.
Ok, you do you. In my experience that is not how that works, but there is an argument to not worry about it if it works well enough.
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