openSUSE 13.2 installation on SSD card with swap using zram.

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

Hi,
I received a 240 gig crucial m500 SSD as a gift and wanting it to replaced the rotating disk of my kids
old HP G60 laptop with 4 gigs ram.
I am thinking of not making a swap partition when I install openSUSE 13.2 with xfce and e19, instead
I will use zram from Malcolmlewis repository.
Any advice on advantage and disadvantage will be appreciated.

Right now this laptop has a win7 and openSUSE 13.2 ona rotating disk with 2-gig of swap for openSUSE but I installed zram
and enabled the service and it is more responsive as I observed.
I also tried the zswap but I noticed that the laptop was not responsive compared with zram.

Advance happy new year and thanks for your help.

#2

With 4 gig I doubt swap is hit all that much so I’d not worry about it just use a swap. It will add a bit of wear but then it only slightly reduces the devices life. More important to turn off atime ie the writing of the last open time stamp. That causes lots of small writes and that will seriously reduce life.

#3

Hi
You could also modify the swappiness via;


vm.swappiness=1
vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50

I use the above with 8GB ram, but may not want to be as aggressive with 4GB, try it and see…

You might also consider changing the elevator (I use noop), plus additional tweaks with respect to the filesystem in use (which is?)

#4

Thanks for the replies.
I installed openSUSE 13.2 using ext- 4
to both / and /home and use zram to swap
also mounted /tmp as tmpfs. The SSD still has an extra unpartitoned
space so I can still make /swap in the future just in case.
I followed the advice above with swapiness and some other tweaks for SSD;)
Laptop boots faster (13 seconds) than before(approx. 67 seconds) w/ xfce 4.10 & e19
and I didn’t reinstall win7.