Title is a bit misleading, and I think intentionally, which kinda irks me. It isn’t a 400x speedup of RAM by means of compression. If I understood correctly, it’s 400x speedup compared to disk read for swap.
Please correct me if I’m wrong here. I’d love some positive news from the IT world that isn’t depressive. (edit: I implied this wasn’t. It is. I’m just not sure of the actual impact)
It’s a little better than your read. The ~400x speedup is in comparison to using ZRAM, which, in very brief terms, compresses memory by creating an in-memory compressed block device and assigning that as your swap space. So your “swap” is actually a compressed chunk of RAM, not on disk.
This was significantly slower than normal memory access because page faulting when looking up something in memory then fetching from swap was, itself, expensive. Regardless of how fast that swap was. When your swap is on a storage device that overhead is comparatively tiny, but when it’s just another chunk of memory suddenly it’s what you’re spending most of your time on.
Wait I think I’ve already been here
I remember this trash:
Why does it look like a heatmap of someone stroking their giant dick?
So there are some benefits to the ram crisis? People actually optimize things because of limited resources.
When I was in computer science in college back in the 1900s, they told us that the USSR was responsible for some of the best algorithms still in use at the time (both for RAM and CPU usage) because they just had less to work with.
Guess we’re all in that boat now.
Ram compression called CRAM? I’m sold
The person who came up with this acronym is probably proud of their work lol
Now the fun part. What would Microsoft name it?
Copilot
