[GRLUG] Solid State Drives

[Collin Kidder]

Michael Mol wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 10:28 AM, Tim Schmidt <timschmidt at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 3:32 PM, Collin Kidder <adderd at kkmfg.com> wrote:
>>     
>>> Swap might be a bit faster than file system access but can't be faster
>>> than the maximum throughput of the drive(s).
>>>       
>> Yes, it can.  It's called compression.  Often used in situations where
>> one might want to shove a large amount of data over a low bandwidth
>> link.  Mainline Linux kernels don't compress swap (yet), but it's
>> certainly a feature I'd expect to see sometime.
>>     
>
> Oi...Disregarding CPU consumption, that would massively complicate the
> swap system.  Your memory pages are no longer a fixed size on disk,
> and may even grow beyond their initial size with nasty enough data.
> So you'd have to use more disk space to guarantee holding the same
> volume of original data.
>
>
>   
Well, to be fair, most compression schemes have ways to store pages 
uncompressed if the compression would have ballooned the data. But that 
makes it even MORE complicated.