[GRLUG] Solid State Drives

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> >>> 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.

PostgreSQL's TOAST storage does exactly this.