RE: Page compression in lieu of swap?

Perez-Gonzalez, Inaky
2003-04-13T03:24:50Z

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Timothy Miller [mailto:tmiller10@cfl.rr.com]
>
>
> Given the hideous amount of time required to access a disk, especially
when
> something else wants to access it, could there be a benefit to "swapping"
> pages by compressing them to somewhere else in memory? If we could
achieve,
> even say, 30% compression on pages, on average, then we could free up RAM

I tried this sometime ago (2.2.x timeframe) for canning mozilla into an
small amount of memory and it was kind of doable - not too complicated,
in fact - the only thing is it would reduce the machine to a crawl some
times (I guess I did not know how to throttle the swap) - I even got it
working with bzip2 -9 [this was a pure exercise].

Iñaky Pérez-González -- Not speaking for Intel -- all opinions are my own
(and my fault)