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Comment by runeks | Hacker News Reader

A blazingly fast SSD is excruciatingly slow RAM.

In-memory memory compression is the most meaningful part of what parent comment said. And it helps tremendously on other systems as well, for example zram is quite underhyped on linux.

zram is a game changer. I believed I needed to upgrade 16gb to 32gb, with zram and a decent cpu no I don't. 97% full memory + 20GB zram swap and no noticeable problems.

The M1 SoC interconnects are what makes their SSD seem like swapping to disk doesn't even feel slow.

I am trying to figure out where I said anything on the contrary.

You mentioned "they come with blazingly fast SSDs" as part of what is "allowing devices to get away with less available memory"

I did indeed, I never said that SSDs are a replacement for RAM, I just said that having access to 2.5GiB/s RW operations allows you to offload many things into the SSD, yes, thrashing is an issue, but it is much more insignificant at those speeds than disks.

I am not defending apple in any way whatsoever, I even mentioned in the first sentence of the comment. I stated that they are able to do that because they compensate with compression and SSDs, applications in the background can be thrown in the swap and the user will rarely notice.

2.5GB/s isn't really all that extraordinary speed anymore.

The part you're skipping over is the memory compression, which is much more important than you think it is.

I think they are saying that you will start swapping to disk with that little ram.

I don't even bother reasoning with apple fans anymore. It's a losing game.

It's not even an argument, their comment is a fact that does not change nor contribute anything.

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