Chromium vs Firefox : Need testimonies

[PCMan]

On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 7:16 AM, Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> 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.

Well, I think the way ArchLinux does it is what we can learn something from.
Having the kernel module installed won't get it activated automatically.
zRAM can be used only when you create a virtual block device for it.
Developers from the Arch community developed a package contaning a
script which detects your environment and add suitable configurations
according to how much you have.
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/zramswap/
It creates zRAM based swap according to how much RAM and how many CPU
cores you have.
The config does ont seem to be static. It's a systemd service which is
launched during boot.
If we can have a upstart script which detects available RAM and CPU
and enable zRAM according to available hardware, that can be awesome.

Thanks!