Here is the thing, I have 4 RPi’s of different generations (all the way from Zero W to 4B 4GB) that I use to host services at home for personal use.
Lately, I have realized I am running out of RAM to host more services, not to mention not enough switch ports to connect to.
Now I know the obvious solution is to get a more powerful setup (maybe a thin client) but electricity isn’t cheap and I am not particularly in the best shape financially speaking to shell out $300+ on a decent client to host my services.
Any suggestions?
There are two types of computer memory that fundamentally matter on the consumer level:
Solid state disk storage, and in particular some SD cards, can be vulnerable to excessive writes.
Ram, however, is not impacted by the number of uses.
A swap file works like this: When memory gets full, you move the least-used parts onto the swap file.
A normal swapfile is on-disk. When memory gets close to full, the system moves some onto the (much much slower, like 10-1000x) on-disk swapfile.
Zram swap creates a compressed swapfile out of your free memory. A file in linux does not have to be on a hard disk/ssd, it just has to look and quack like a file. When memory gets close to full, the system copies some onto the in-memory compressed file. This is very fast, but uses some cpu. It doesn’t touch your drive storage.
That is a great explanation. It makes perfect sense to me know. Thank you