If you are on Linux you can 'download' some RAM. Enable zram, configure sysctl variables to make good use of it.

Note that it won't help you if your workload makes use of all your RAM at once.

If you have a bunch of stuff running in the background it will help a lot.

I get 2 to 3 compression factor at all times with zstd. I calculated the utility to be as if I had 20GB extra RAM for what I do.

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password4321 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Back in the day if you could find a deal on defective RAM (that wasn't going to degrade further?), Linux could be configured to avoid the defects. Unfortunately this isn't allowed with secure/UEFI boot.

https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/badr...

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m4rtink 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On many modern distros (like Fedora) ZRAM is enabled by default. :)

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fredoralive 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s not particularly unique, Mac OS and Windows have had compressed memory for years. No fiddling with setting needed either.

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creatonez 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> No fiddling with setting needed either.

It's since become the default in several distributions, including Fedora.

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AdamN 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not just that it's compressed - the OS is also intelligently handling which memory should be on hardware vs. virtual. Effectively a lot of the memory concerns have been offloaded to the OS and the VM where one exists.

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the-grump 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn't that literally every modern OS, always, unless you tell it to act differently?

	▲	AdamN 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes - I didn't mean to imply it was only one of the OSes. Further up the comments people were talking about how memory efficiency is now more important but I was trying to make the point that with compression and virtual memory it still doesn't matter all that much even if memory is double the price.