I accidentally found a italian video that talks about this Zram and I immediately thought of Zynthian… but my computer ignorance wins over my curiosity… I’ll leave the final verdict to the experts (in case they haven’t seen this thing). Thanks
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Hi @Lanfranco .
In general, when you start swapping it means that you are using more RAM than the available. In a general use computer this is acceptable as you may have programs running that you seldom use. When you swap out your text editor, it does not hurt you to wait one more second, When you are dealing with sound or video, these delays are simply not acceptable because then the system becomes useless. Excuse me if you already know this.
In zynthian we should use all the available RAM for processing the sounds coming from the different chains and processors. We should try not to run more things that we can otherwise we would start getting xruns, that means periods of time where we cannot process and produce the expected sounds.
So my recommendation would be not to use swap at all or in a very limited way if you have a fast device (i.e. NVME), probably not in an SD card.
What i think will be game changing is the next release of the linux kernet 6.12 which will be, for the first time, a real-time kernel, we could benefit a lot from this, just let your imagination run.
Best
Pau
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Thanks @pau for this clarification, as I said I am absolutely not computer literate. In fact in the videos I saw, they only talk about things that do not interest us on a Zynthian, they talk about videos, internet and other things that do not concern the music played… Thanks
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We talked about it ages go ZRAM swap alternative - #7 by Baggypants
Quite a lot of distros have it turned on now by default as it’s low impact and generally is better than no swap at all.
If you don’t have swap your system reaches right for the OOM killer rather than a more graceful degradation of performance.
all you have to do is
apt install zram-tools
systemctl enable --now zramswap
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