wurmfood 18 Posted April 8 Share Posted April 8 I'm trying to understand the role of zram and having some difficulties with it. I've looked in several places and my understanding is this: - It's a block device in RAM that uses compression - It functions similar to swap I notice that mine is set to about 2 Gb: wurmfood@helios64:~$ cat /proc/swaps Filename Type Size Used Priority /dev/zram0 partition 1945084 0 5 My questions: 1. Does that mean 2 Gb of the device RAM is used for the zram swap device? 2. I can understand this on devices with slower storage, but would it be reasonable to disable this and instead use swap on an SSD? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Werner 400 Posted April 8 Share Posted April 8 4 minutes ago, wurmfood said: Does that mean 2 Gb of the device RAM is used for the zram swap device? Yes. 4 minutes ago, wurmfood said: but would it be reasonable to disable this and instead use swap on an SSD? Also yes. Armbian by default uses 50% if available memory for zram. If you have a fast harddrive like SSD or NVMe attached it of course makes sense to put a common swap there. 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
wurmfood 18 Posted April 8 Author Share Posted April 8 Thank you. I wanted to make sure I understood it correctly since I hadn't encountered this on other Linux systems. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Werner 400 Posted April 8 Share Posted April 8 Most of them do not run of a sdcard which limited life span so they can rely on a normal swap partition. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
gprovost 156 Posted April 8 Share Posted April 8 You can change the settings in /etc/default/armbian-zram-config Maybe the default settings are effectively overkill with 4GB of RAM. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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