• xxce2AAb@feddit.dk
    30·
    6 days ago

    Look, I’m not saying I’d gleefully burn Nvidia to the ground. I’m just saying I wouldn’t help put out the fire.

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      5 days ago

      I’d piss on nVidia, though.

      Especially if I had a massive amount of asparagus.

      It’s not likely to do much with a good fire, it, eh, it’s gonna make them smell nasty.

  • tias@discuss.tchncs.de
    25·
    5 days ago

    I downloaded more RAM in the 90s. It was a product called RAM Doubler for the Macintosh. At that time memory had to be pre-allocated for applications through a setting in the resource fork, always used exactly the amount you set, and couldn’t grow beyond that. It was static, making it hard to run multiple programs simultaneously. RAM Doubler did wonders to work around that OS limitation.

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
      3·
      5 days ago

      There was a virtual swap space program that I downloaded in the Windows 95-98 era that did something similar. Worked reasonably well, if slowly, but everything was slower back then with computers.

    • ulterno@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      4 days ago

      Tell me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t it be more expensive (and slow) than HDDs even at current prices?

      • khannie@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        5 days ago

        There was a dude somewhere on the internet that used Google drive for swap space. I’ll see if I can dig it up…

        Edit: link.

      • palordrolap@fedia.io
        28·
        5 days ago

        You like cursed?

        Way back in the mists of time I got a 32MB (not a typo) upgrade for an 8MB computer. In total: 40MB.

        Since I knew it ran fine with just the 8MB, I set up a RAM disk of 32MB and put the Windows swap file in it. Windows absolutely insisted (and maybe still does) that there be a swap file, so why not put that back in RAM?

        It worked perfectly, but that memory was better used for other things, so the cursed setup didn’t last all that long.

        Edits: Typo city baby.

          • palordrolap@fedia.io
            3·
            5 days ago

            You had me concerned for a second, but “mists of time” shows up on Wiktionary (easier to be wrong), Merriam Webster’s site (likely to be right) or the Oxford English Dictionary (practically canonical), whereas “midst(s) of time” does not.

            Collins Dictionary and Dictionary.com don’t list either, but the existence of the former in other places would seem to suggest that that’s the right one.

        • dan@upvote.au
          4·
          5 days ago

          I would have loved to have 32 MB RAM. I was stuck with a 486 with 16 MB RAM and 600ish MB HDD until 2003 or so, because we couldn’t afford to upgrade. I think I upgraded to a second-hand Pentium 3 at that point, and upgraded the RAM with mismatched RAM modules (different brands, different capacities) salvaged from systems my school was throwing away.

          A simpler time. I miss it sometimes. Neither me (as a teenager) nor my parents had any money, but I did have enough free time to learn how to code and play shareware games. It gave me something to do that didn’t cost much money. Over 20 years later and I’m still coding.

          • ulterno@programming.devEnglish
            0·
            4 days ago

            systems my school was throwing away

            I wish people threw away perfectly usable stuff in places I could easily find them.

            • dan@upvote.au
              2·
              1 day ago

              The computers they were throwing away were broken, and they didn’t have a use for PC-133 RAM any more.

              • ulterno@programming.devEnglish
                0·
                1 day ago

                Over here, people usually sell that level of stuff to some known parts dealer for pretty cheap.
                I am just a hoarder who has kept my last few phones hoping to some day be able to use their high quality cameras with something else.

  • turdas@suppo.fi
    10·
    5 days ago
    $ zramctl
NAME       ALGORITHM DISKSIZE  DATA COMPR   TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 lzo-rle      62.6G  2.8G  972M 1011.4M         [SWAP]

    Already did

    • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      Based zramctl. Makes my 8GB RAM system run like I had 12 GB, which is quite significant in this new internet world where opening a second tab in a web browser costs almost 600 MB.

    • ominous ocelot@leminal.space
      2·
      5 days ago

      What’s the use case over RAM or disk swap? It’s compressed but faster than SSD? Hmm. That could help in distinct use cases…

      • turdas@suppo.fi
        6·
        5 days ago

        Yes, it’s basically faster than disk swap but uses some CPU cycles. The compression algorithms involved are very fast on modern CPUs so in some sense it’s “free RAM”.

        I set mine to almost 1:1 my physical RAM, because the way it works is that the zram disk size (62.6G there) is the amount of uncompressed data allowed on it, and the compression on real-world data is almost always at least 50% – so if the zram device fills up, it’ll be using something like 32G of physical memory. I’m yet to hit real-world usecases that would have tested these limits though, and the defaults are much more conservative.