zswap – compcache, compressed swap for better performance

First, here is a link to article on compcache.

http://code.google.com/p/compcache/wiki/CompilingAndUsingNew

zswap is already in the kernel and you can see the documentation in the kernel documentation. Here is the name of the file if you need:

/usr/share/doc/kernel-doc-$(uname -r)/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt

Here is the overview, in case you do not want to install kernel-doc

Overview:

Zswap is a lightweight compressed cache for swap pages. It takes pages that are
in the process of being swapped out and attempts to compress them into a
dynamically allocated RAM-based memory pool.  zswap basically trades CPU cycles
for potentially reduced swap I/O.  This trade-off can also result in a
significant performance improvement if reads from the compressed cache are
faster than reads from a swap device.

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browsing the windows machines and their shares – listing

smbtree is a very nice command to check all the machines that are present in the LAN (your connected network). For this to work you may need to look at this article also.

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      smbtree -U <strong>username
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

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vmstat – what it is and how to use?

vmstat provides a summary of various functions within the system, including system wide free memory, paging counters, summarized disk activity, system calls and cpu utilization.

The output of vmstat and description of what each field means:

The first line of output from vmstat shows a summary since boot,
followed by the output over the last 3 seconds for each additional line.

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Are you swapped? Increase the performance of Linux machine.

With the ever increasing cost of the Hardware, the amount of physical RAM available on the system is increasing day by day. For example, couple of years back, I had a system which was very high end Desktop with 256MB RAM and today I have a 2GB RAM Desktop. So, whats the point.

The Linux systems (right word should be kernel) are desiged to use both RAM and swap partition. Swap partition is a partition on Hard disk and is used mostly like RAM. Problem is that HDD access is always slower than RAM access and hence inherently, the system will work little slower even if you have enough RAM not to use swap. The term ”swappiness” is used to determine how the kernel should try to seam-balance between the use of RAM and swap. By default, most of the distro’s have a swappiness of 60. A higher value of swappiness means that the RAM will be swapped out faster.