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If you are on Linux you can 'download' some RAM. Enable zram, configure sysctl variables to make good use of it.

Note that it won't help you if your workload makes use of all your RAM at once.

If you have a bunch of stuff running in the background it will help a lot.

I get 2 to 3 compression factor at all times with zstd. I calculated the utility to be as if I had 20GB extra RAM for what I do.

discuss

password4321|3 days ago

Back in the day if you could find a deal on defective RAM (that wasn't going to degrade further?), Linux could be configured to avoid the defects. Unfortunately this isn't allowed with secure/UEFI boot.

https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/badr...

hinkley|3 days ago

I helped someone turn that on because we still didn’t have full furniture sets in our houses and new memory was going to have to wait a couple paychecks.

Several times I set about trying to turn it on and found out a whole chip was fried and that means the 7th bit of every read was stuck, so nothing much you can do there.

fredoralive|4 days ago

That’s not particularly unique, Mac OS and Windows have had compressed memory for years. No fiddling with setting needed either.

antonkochubey|3 days ago

On windows there is a compensation control in the form of start menu written in react that needs 7 msedgewebview processes to run so that you can search for an app.

AdamN|4 days ago

It's not just that it's compressed - the OS is also intelligently handling which memory should be on hardware vs. virtual. Effectively a lot of the memory concerns have been offloaded to the OS and the VM where one exists.

creatonez|3 days ago

> No fiddling with setting needed either.

It's since become the default in several distributions, including Fedora.

m4rtink|3 days ago

On many modern distros (like Fedora) ZRAM is enabled by default. :)