If you’re running Ubuntu on an old machine with low RAM or a lower-powered laptop, you could worried about the performance. One way to increase its performance is make more use of RAM instead of swap disk (which is slow).

There’s a project called zRam (previously called “compcache”) that creates a compressed block device in RAM to avoid paging on disk until it is necessary to use the swap space on the hard disk.

Even though the cost of RAM hardware is relatively low this feature still offers advantages for netbooks and other lower-powered latops, virtualization and in the case of embedded devices, especially those that use flash memories that have a limited lifespan, dependent on write-use and thus wear out quickly when used as a swap device.

To install zRam in Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10, 12.04

You can install zram via ppa:shnatsel/zram, or download the .deb from this page.

PPA installation execute following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:shnatsel/zram
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install zramswap-enabler