Impressive. When faced with a similar issue (laptop from 2015 with 4GB of RAM), I turned to zswap and then zram. Zram works incredibly well with 6:1 compression ratios. It seems web browsers data compresses particularly well (much better than it should).
It worked really well back then for day-to-day things like Office and Netscape… I remember a RAM Doubler/Speed Doubler combo making my PowerMac 7100 really noticeably snappier.
I really enjoyed this upgrade story, and laughed audibly at the conclusion:
I’ve now got an XPS13 with 16GB of memory.
But next time I think I’ll just buy the 16GB variant upfront.
1:6 seems very reasonable given a lot of the content will be text which compresses very well. Then there will be a lot of UI memory which is also pretty repetitive. http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html
Since it doesn’t exist, I’m assuming the benefits aren’t there, but why can’t one buy a thunderbolt -> DDR adaptor of some sort, as a stopgap between main ram and ssd swap? What am I not seeing that rules it out?
Since Thunderbolt is, in the best case, PCIe, I think this answer applies in full. Even looking at this link from that thread I’m having a hard time seeing how this could be better than just attaching the fastest SSD you can get and using it as a swap volume. I don’t think thunderbolt is going to let you get to RAM faster than it will an NVMe SSD.
Impressive. When faced with a similar issue (laptop from 2015 with 4GB of RAM), I turned to zswap and then zram. Zram works incredibly well with 6:1 compression ratios. It seems web browsers data compresses particularly well (much better than it should).
Hehe, kinda funny that in 2021 you can “download more RAM” for your computer!
This idea is very old, e.g. in the 1990ies there was RAM Doubler for Macs:
https://tidbits.com/1996/10/28/ram-doubler-2/
Or Quarterdeck MagnaRAM for Windows 3.1:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM#MagnaRAM
It worked really well back then for day-to-day things like Office and Netscape… I remember a RAM Doubler/Speed Doubler combo making my PowerMac 7100 really noticeably snappier.
I really enjoyed this upgrade story, and laughed audibly at the conclusion:
1:6 seems very reasonable given a lot of the content will be text which compresses very well. Then there will be a lot of UI memory which is also pretty repetitive. http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html
Since it doesn’t exist, I’m assuming the benefits aren’t there, but why can’t one buy a thunderbolt -> DDR adaptor of some sort, as a stopgap between main ram and ssd swap? What am I not seeing that rules it out?
Since Thunderbolt is, in the best case, PCIe, I think this answer applies in full. Even looking at this link from that thread I’m having a hard time seeing how this could be better than just attaching the fastest SSD you can get and using it as a swap volume. I don’t think thunderbolt is going to let you get to RAM faster than it will an NVMe SSD.