Nothing feels good like seeing a near 4:1 compression ratio on lightly used memory.
zramctl NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT /dev/zram0 zstd 7.5G 1.6G 441.2M 452.5M [SWAP] A few weeks ago I was destroying my machine. It was becoming near unresponsive. We're talking music skipping, window manager chugging levels of thrash. With RustAnalyzer analyzing, Nix building containers, and my dev server watching and rebuilding, it was disruptive to the point that I was turning things off just to get a prototype shipped.
I hadn't really done much tuning on this machine. My Gentoo days were in the past. Well, it was becoming unavoidable. Overall changes that stacked up:
- zramswap
- tuned kernel (a particular process launch went from 0.27 to 0.2s)
- preemptable kernel
- tuned disk parameters to get rid of atime etc
- automatic trimming
- synchronized all my nixpkgs versions so that my disk use is about 30GB
And for non-Linux things, I switched out my terminal for vterm (Emacs) and am currently running some FDO/PLO on Emacs after getting almost a 30% speed bump from just recompiling it with -march and -mtune flags on LLVM.
I also split up my Rust crates, which was a massive benefit for some of them regardless of full vs incremental rebuild.
And as a result, I just built two Nix containers at the same time while developing and the system was buttery smooth the whole time. My Rust web dev is back to near real-time.
I wish I had benchmarks at each step along the way, but in any case, the end, I was able to build everything quickly, enabling me to find that logins were completely broken on PrizeForge and that I need to fix the error logging to debug it, so I have to crash before my brain liquifies from lack of sleep.
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