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Transparent memory offloading: more memory at a fraction of the cost and power

engineering.fb.com

21–30 of 62 posts

Re: Transparent memory offloading: more memory at a fraction of the cost and power

#21

The inevitable, albeit cynic response: Imagine how much DRAM could be saved if Facebook was shut down! Or put differently: I have only the greatest respect for the Facebook engineers who come up with innovations like this. This one seems to save cost, lowers power use and improves performance all at the same time. If only this engineering talent could be steered to better causes. Facebook is a net negative for societ…

>Facebook is a net negative for society

Bold claim, Cotton. I personally have a hard time imagining a world where if Facebook didn't exist, something like it wouldn't either. There were plenty of companies vying for the same idea. Or is the suggestion that all usage of the internet to allow people to connect with each other are bad.

Re: Transparent memory offloading: more memory at a fraction of the cost and power

#22
post #4
post #3

or "Meta re-invents swap disk"

You should read the whole article, because TMO does differ from traditional swapping. Notably, swapping usually occurs during periods of extreme memory pressure, where as TMO will offload memory much sooner and more intelligently.

So they found out vm.swappiness?

Re: Transparent memory offloading: more memory at a fraction of the cost and power

#24
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahhh, but they compress the memory! Anyone else remember Ram Doubler for pre OSX Macs?

Oh yes. Mac OS X started doing that in Mavericks as well

Darwin does it, NT does it, and Linux can do it (I use swap on zram, there's also zswap). Nice to see it widely (if quietly) used:)

Re: Transparent memory offloading: more memory at a fraction of the cost and power

#25
post #19

Personally, I want to see PCIe x16 devices (or U2 NVMe) where you can plug a few sticks of RAM to get a temporary volume. It would be ideal for caching!

Please build it!

+ oncard battery to survive reboots

Re: Transparent memory offloading: more memory at a fraction of the cost and power

#29

The inevitable, albeit cynic response: Imagine how much DRAM could be saved if Facebook was shut down! Or put differently: I have only the greatest respect for the Facebook engineers who come up with innovations like this. This one seems to save cost, lowers power use and improves performance all at the same time. If only this engineering talent could be steered to better causes. Facebook is a net negative for societ…

Apparently you don't use Tiktok. Facebook is bad but TikTok is next level bad. It damages a whole new generation's dopamine system and their mental health and who knows what. FB is a declining empire which is less relevant day by day . Time will take care of it. But TikTok is the real bad boy. If you put chinese communist government into equation , then it is even worse.

Re: Transparent memory offloading: more memory at a fraction of the cost and power

#30
post #20

If you are interested in Pressure Stall Information mentioned in the post, be sure to check LWN article on it, Tracking pressure-stall information: https://lwn.net/Articles/759781/

This was added in back 2018, so we've had a while to start using it.. anyone have experiences of other tools using this information?
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