How do I use zRam?
Here you go. Here is the whole tutorial about zRam in Ubuntu:
zRam is a code inside kernel, that once activated, creates a RAM based block device which acts as a swap disk, but is compressed and stored in memory, allowing very fast I/O and increasing the amount of memory available before the system starts swapping to disk.
zRam is integrated into the Linux kernel 3.2 and above, so it's included already in Ubuntu 12.04.
Previously on my 2GB machine, without zRAM, when i open lots of browser tabs, the system start choking, while HDD start copying data to SWAP causing a total slowdown. Now after activating zRam, instead of freezing after running out of RAM, the system worked like nothing happened. I didn't notice any difference at all. It looked just like adding more RAM ;)
From my experience, zRam is useful for people using computers with 1GB or 2GB RAM. Since zRam is compressing data, it require some processor resources. Not much, but always. For that reason i do not recommend to use it with old processors. Also if you have 4GB RAM most likely it won't be necessary to use it.
To activate it, type in terminal:
sudo apt-get install zram-configTo remove [type the following]:
sudo dpkg --purge zramswap-enabler sudo dpkg --purge zram-config
Like Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff was quoted in that blog post, this package installs a script to run it as a service. The script automatically configures itself and the service starts up automatically. There is no further configuration needed. The service can be manually controlled via:
sudo service zramswap start|stop|status|restart|reload|force-reload
If you open the deb package with file roller you can see that only two files are installed:
/etc/init/zramswap.conf
/etc/init.d/zramswap
Along with some documentation files. The DEBIAN directory contains package meta data and commands to initialize the service. Thats all there is in the package. The corresponding devices are named after this scheme: /dev/zram[0-9]
Have you installed it via PPA? I recommend doing that.
The service daemon will activate instantly upon install. You can verify this by typing in a terminal:
cat /proc/swaps
There should be some /dev/XXX entry (given you have a swap partition/file active) and at least one entries with "swap" in its name (there will be one for each processor core on our system). If not, try rebooting and type in the command again.
There are no further actions neccessary.