So, a quick review of an experiment I ran this week. (I also posted this at the brazilian Linux community)

Since RAM prices are VERY high, I wondered if Intel’s Optane memory would be a good intermediate substitute between my SSD (a WD Green that doesn’t even hit 150 MB/s on btrfs with LUKS) and having more RAM.

I did some research and saw the prices were very low, so why not buy one? Basically, the 16GB M10 modules are the Optane-only ones, so technically they would be good for this kind of task.

It arrived, I installed it on the motherboard, partitioned it as a swap, added it to fstab, and the 13.4 GiB of swap was there, with zswap configured using zswap.max_pool_percent=90 zswap.accept_threshold_percent=95, and zstd as the compression algorithm. The machine is running Artix with XFCE, a Xeon E5 2667 v4 CPU, 16 GB of RAM, and an RTX 3050 6GB.

I decided to play Victoria 3, and it was smooth. I also compiled a few Java projects, it ran smoothly as well. Then, since I didn’t have anything more intimidating for my RAM, I downloaded an open LLM model to test the memory pressure, just the file size is larger than my combined VRAM + RAM, and it was the Qwen-AgentWorld-35B-A3B-UD-Q4_K_S.

It ran smoothly. Then I played a video in FreeTube and opened LibreWolf, asked it some questions, and it handled the token generation at 20 tk/s in llama.cpp without any issues. It had occasional slight hiccups (much smaller than when the swap was on my SSD), but considering I was using all of that (as shown in the image) as swap space, I think it honestly withstood the memory pressure. I tested again with lz4 as the compression algorithm and got an OOM when loading the model, so every bit of compression seems to matter as well.

So, I think it might be worth it for anyone who has a swap file on a entry level SATA SSD or an HDD, it’s a good middle ground. But if you have an expensive NVME SSD, then idk if it’s very worthwhile.

I did notice a good improvement in the PC. I don’t think it was that useful, but at this price, it’s basically free performance.

  • juipeltje@lemmy.world
    6·
    13 hours ago

    I think i saw a wan show clip a while back talking about how these optane drives could give huge gains for things like LLMs and such. Could’ve perhaps been a huge success if intel made these things during the AI craze.