zswap – compcache, compressed swap for better performance

2013-11-17 2 min read Linux

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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