Should I enable/disable memory compression?

[xh43k]

Sunology entire system is dumb AF tbh, plenty of free ram, it insists of using swap instead.

 

[Jan Janowski]

When I compared with, and without, but also different sized ram options, comparing 2, 6, and 10 GB, on a 720+… The Ram and CPU results were not at all clear, based on changing ram amount,Or Ram Compression. That’s where I came up with the “Bragging Rights” benefit on ram expansion. The only one thing that always changed was Cache size, but even increasing that Cache did not seem to improve file access either — which furthered the “Bragging Rights” benefit idea. So more info on what this does: sure would help!
Now during this time we also played around with changing M2Cache sizing.
I did Not see a difference between 128 & 256 GB of M.2 Cache! But I did not try with vs without M.2 Cache at that time, which prevents me from any results on that.

 

[xh43k]

When I compared with, and without, but also different sized ram options, comparing 2, 6, and 10 GB, on a 720+… The Ram and CPU results were not at all clear, based on changing ram amount,Or Ram Compression. That’s where I came up with the “Bragging Rights” benefit on ram expansion. The only one thing that always changed was Cache size, but even increasing that Cache did not seem to improve file access either — which furthered the “Bragging Rights” benefit idea. So more info on what this does: sure would help!

Are you high ?
What are you talking about ? Adding ram to a system is about bragging rights ? Wtf.

 

[Jan Janowski]

tests I did saw no speed or access difference. Therefore —the only benefits were “Bragging Rights”

 

[Pauljw]

shame to have to explain that, Jan.

 

[xh43k]

Anyway, since it seems that the synology tweaked linux is on the IQ level of a 2yo child I am just disabling both swap as well as memory compression altogether, since 8GB of RAM is definitely enough and I won't waste any electricity or further resources for this dumb NAS insisting on using either memory compression or swap file all the fucking time.

swapoff -a see yaaa

 

[Pauljw]

Nice, maybe now you'll have time to work on that vocabulary.

 

[xh43k]

Nice, maybe now you'll have time to work on that vocabulary.

Ah, I see you’ve got a lexicon magnifying glass! Impressive. But hey, while you’re busy scrutinizing my vocabulary, I’ll be over here conquering the thesaurus one word at a time.

 

[Jan Janowski]

shame to have to explain that, Jan.

That would be the need for explanation of these, then!

 

[xh43k]

That would be the need for explanation of these, then!

Yes please care to elaborate on why synology chose the kernel options they use right now, which compared to any other server or NAS OS are absolutely nonstandard in terms of swap use.
You see, over the past 15+ years I worked with various vendors and systems, including EMC, NetApp, none of them prioritized use of SLOW SWAP STORAGE instead of available RAM.

Go on, I'll wait.

It's not like expandability is done via non-standard/non-supported tinkering and hacks, it is literally what synology supports, memory expansion slot is available and they sell memory sticks themselves.
So by setting kernel in a way that plain ignores available RAM and instead keeps swapping, to me, it seems like a failure on Synology side.

While amusing and fun, your comments were absolutely not helpful and just wasting my time.

 

[fredbert]

Firstly, personal digs are against the forum rules.

As for memory compression, it's probably coming from when the NAS had 256 and 512 MB RAM and people wanted to run more than plain file sharing and lightweight network services. When paging out to HDD space this does have performance issues: anyone in the past that has upgraded a PC/Mac/etc from HDD to SSD, without changing RAM size, will attest to the performance improvement of not using spinning swap. I guess the idea is to offload using compression (CPU) and RAM storage rather than write to HDD. But if your NAS rarely ever over uses its RAM then it's arguable as to whether having compression enabled (and seems from reports used regardless) is truly necessary.

 

[xh43k]

Firstly, personal digs are against the forum rules.

As for memory compression, it's probably coming from when the NAS had 256 and 512 MB RAM and people wanted to run more than plain file sharing and lightweight network services. When paging out to HDD space this does have performance issues: anyone in the past that has upgraded a PC/Mac/etc from HDD to SSD, without changing RAM size, will attest to the performance improvement of not using spinning swap. I guess the idea is to offload using compression (CPU) and RAM storage rather than write to HDD. But if your NAS rarely ever over uses its RAM then it's arguable as to whether having compression enabled (and seems from reports used regardless) is truly necessary.

The main problem is that synology insists on using swap even when not needed, this is the main culprit.
Due to this reason, enabling memory compression is a must, since then it 'swaps' by compressing memory instead of using disk.

However, by disabling both swap file as well as memory compression, the memory is getting used properly now.

So this is a huge flaw and problem on synology side from my point of view, but they dont really care, therefore my solution is to simply disable swap and memory compression altogether. (When using additional memory module ofc)

 

[Telos]

it insists of using swap instead

You think that is bad... see here:

swapoff it will now be