I read an interesting article (http://lwn.net/Articles/334649/) about compcache, a kernel module that creates a compressed swapfile in RAM. It has some interesting use cases for both limited resource computing and virtualization. While you decrease your main ram and incur some additional overhead having to decompress the swap, it is orders of magnitude faster than disk-based swap, effectively increasing your total ram for a very minimal performance hit. When running it in the hypervisor, you can increase the total amount of virtual machines that a given server can host as the entire virtual machine runs in swapable ram. There have been reports of performance boosts using compcache when running a Windows VM under the KVM hypervisor. More relevant to FGM is the increased amount of available ram to thin clients without disk swap. The compcache developers did some performance testing with LTSP running local firefox and kdpf. Here (http://code.google.com/p/compcache/wiki/Performance/LTSPPerf) are the results. They look promising. There is a dramatic increase in the amount of pdf files that can be opened at once, as well as improvements in responsiveness when paging through documents. Similar effects were seen in firefox when switching/opening tabs. Compcache is officially in the mainline kernel as of the most stable release (2.6.33.3.) Ubuntu 10.04 is running 2.6.32, BUT they have patched their kernel to add support (since version 8.10.) Note, they are not running the most recent version of compcache. You can test it out by typing: $ sudo modprobe ramzswap $ sudo swapon /dev/ramzswap0 -p 100 The first line will load the module and create the default swap device 15% of the size of physical ram. The second line activates the swap with higher priority than default disk swap if it exists. The system will fall back to disk swap if the ramzswap device is full. Here (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Compcache) is more information from the Ubuntu wiki. Tony _________________________________________________________________ The New Busy is not the old busy. Search, chat and e-mail from your inbox. http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_3** This list is PUBLICLY archived. ** PLEASE don't post personal or sensitive information unless you wish for it to be in the public domain. To visit the main website for Free Geek Michiana go to http://www.freegeekmichiana.org To post to the list send email to frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx The archive is available at //www.freelists.org/archives/frgeek-michiana/ You may unsubscribe or change your list settings by going to the list website at //www.freelists.org/webpage/frgeek-michiana