[ANNOUNCE] Compressed RAM swap device (compcache) 0.2 released

Nitin Gupta nitingupta910 at gmail.com
Mon Mar 3 01:55:34 EST 2008


Hi All,

I am pleased to announce compcache 0.2 - Compressed RAM based swap
device for Linux.
 - Project Home: http://code.google.com/p/compcache/
 - compcache-0.2: http://compcache.googlecode.com/files/compcache-0.2.tar.bz2

* Introduction
compcache is virtual RAM based block device which acts as swap disk.
Pages compressed to this disk are compressed and stored in memory
itself. This helps a lot in performance under memory pressure as it
avoids/delays swapping to slower hard-disks (Desktops) or using flash
as swapping device which suffers from wear-leveling issues (Embedded).

* Use Cases
 - Embedded Devices
 - Low Memory Desktops (Virtual Machines!)

Some performance numbers can be found on Project Home. Testing on
Linux VMs with typical workload (KDE, Firefox, Openoffice, Amarok
etc.) shows <5% wastage by underlying allocator together with
significant performance gain under memory pressure.

README file included contains usage details.

* Changelog: version 0.2 vs 0.1
 - Fixed bug on systems with highmem
 - Better filtering-out of non-swap requests
 - Export statistics through proc nodes:
   - /proc/compcache
   - /proc/tlsfinfo
 - Debug and Statistics support for allocator
   and compcache can now be individually turned
   on/off by setting DEBUG, STATS to 0/1 in
   respective header files
 - Swap device now renamed to /dev/compcache0
 - Added scripts: use_compcache.sh and unuse_compcache.sh
   See README for usage
 - Default compcache size set to 25% of RAM
 - Lots of code cleanups
 - Updated README
 - Created Changelog :)


All suggestions welcome.

Cheers!
Nitin



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