Chromium vs Firefox : Need testimonies

[Jonathan Marsden]

On 06/01/2013 03:30 PM, Yorvyk wrote:

> I've not found any down sides to zRAM with more than 512 MiB of RAM.
> Below that, especially with CPUs below 1GHz, there are frequent pauses
> as memory gets swapped about when the zRAM allocation has been used up
> and swap starts using the disk partition/file. Above 2GiB of RAM zRAM
> doesn't appear to have much effect.

And this is the problem... when you *really* need it, on older slower
PCs with little RAM, zRAM doesn't work as smoothly as some seem to be
suggesting.  Using it on a 2GB Lubuntu machine seems somewhat
pointless... you already have enough RAM for most normal desktop usage
purposes in that case.

My sense is that zRAM probably helps most in a fairly small set of
machines that have decent CPUs *and* limited RAM... maybe 1.5GHz to 2GHz
dual core CPUs and 512MB to 1GB of RAM?  But I don't think that is all
that common, and such machines can often add more RAM, which is the
right way to prolong their usefulness, I think.

> Adjusting swappiness down to 10 or 20 also causes similar effects to
> above on really low resource machines.

And those effects do not happen with a default install?  That's a bit
surprising...  Once a machine needs more RAM than is physically present,
you *are* going to get swapping and the related delays.  But lowering
swappiness should not (I'd think!) make that issue worse.

> These effects are probably due to the low memory bandwidth and slow HDDs
> in older machinery.

Which are the exact machines that a "fix" for lack of RAM is needed on.

Overall, I think we do better to leave things as they are, and document
use of zRAM and swappiness changes as things for the enterprising
enthusiast to try out if they wish to.  That way, we do not accidentally
make things worse for the majority who either have enough RAM already,
or are willing to tolerate swapping because they know they lack
sufficient RAM.

Note: A default browser that uses less RAM for common use cases *is* a
really good idea for Lubuntu, all other things being equal.  Trying to
be more expert than the kernel maintainers about swapping and RAM usage
may not be such a great idea, IMO.

Let's pick a good default browser.  Let's not mess with swappiness or
zRAM-by-default.

Jonathan