So my awesome wife (for my b-day) got me a gift certificate to my favorite recycled computer parts store, and I got a great little laptop for $60.
It has 256MB of ram which is actually pretty fine, given I have been able to get base-system ram usage down to between 30-35MB. Still, it's an older machine and the hard drive is slow, so when linux transfers and fetches pages to and from swap, the perceived smoothness of the OS takes a big hit.
By coincidence I recently came across an article at lwn.net on 'compcache' (
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" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false ) and how it compresses unused pages in ram and basically functions as a compressed swap in ram, passing on the compressed swap to regular swap on a block device (in my case, /dev/hda1) when the ram-swap gets full.
I don't have benchmarks and quite honestly wouldn't know where to begin to make them, but anecdotally I have noticed a performance increase in Antix since using compcache. Flash video seems to have less pauses, and there is less choppiness when playing audio.
It seems that my machine is much faster at transferring compressed swap space in ram back to usable working memory than retrieving uncompressed pages from swap on my hard drive, and I suspect this is the case with a lot of other Antix users.
In addition to added speed, I essentially can run more applications in ram before the machine starts swapping to the hard drive.
Has anyone else on this forum used compcache? What are your thoughts and experiences? Does anyone know if compcache integration is being looked at for inclusion in future Antix releases?