One more Chrome OS memory update, zRam now works!

I have just found out that in the month since I last tried to activate zRam (virtual memory) on my Samsung ARM Chromebook, it’s now been enabled for this platform. My last post on memory management was made before I discovered this. To turn it on, do this:

  • Ctrl-Alt-T to open a crosh terminal window
  • Type swap enable
  • Restart
    • I’ll probably leave the “don’t discard” flag set for a while, but it’s really likely to be moot with the virtual memory working. Woohoo!

2 thoughts on “One more Chrome OS memory update, zRam now works!

  1. Roger Shelton

    I have both zram and Don’t discard enabled. Let’s say I am entering this response and I open a few more tabs to find some information, so my response isn’t so dumb. If Chrome OS runs out of memory (with or without zram), one or more tabs will be closed (they call it discarded, but the tabs are really closed). If this tab happens to be one of them, when I click back onto this tab, it gets reloaded from the web and my un-posted comments have been lost. I find that completely unacceptable. In case you are interested, you can open a tab to “chrome://discards” and see the tabs you have and their priority for discarding. You can also open a crosh shell and type “top” to see the status of zram.

    I don’t want to ever run out of memory, but if I do, I would rather have the new tab not open, instead of taking the risk of having some data that might be lost. Just me. I submitted an issue “http://goo.gl/RVBrs” but there are several issues out there about tab discards and I don’t expect them to get around to them very soon (if every). I guess they think everyone will be using Google Docs and let Docs save your work if that tab gets closed. Here is the current definition of which tabs they close first.

    https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/tab-discarding-and-reloading

    Anyway, I will continue to have both zram and don’t discard enabled. If zram keeps your Chromebook from ever running out of memory, then “don’t discard” never gets used. I want KNOW my data won’t get lost.

    Reply
  2. joel Post author

    Roger, I’ve still got both (zRam and “don’t discard” set. Have not had a page discard since I did this, which is quite an improvement. As you state, you don’t want to lose a lot of work, and w/o these settings, it was problematic. Agreed, the “chrome://discards” gives you discard priority, count and memory usage. I also like the “monitor memory” flag which shows the memory usage dynamically on the lower right of the screen. You can also get it out of crosh by using the “top” command. Top also shows swap file usage, as does “swap status” from crosh. Thx for the comment!

    Reply

Leave a Reply to joel Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *