Install More RAM on Linux ARM Device

More RAM

Of course Pi-Apps lets you download more RAM!
Have you ever been using your Raspberry Pi when the screen froze? Most likely, your system ran out of RAM.
On default Raspberry Pi OS, freezes happen easily and suddenly. When the RAM fills up, the entire system becomes unresponsive. Many people think the only solution is to buy a Pi with more RAM, but THAT'S NOT TRUE and this app proves it.

This app uses ZRAM to increase the capacity of your RAM. ZRAM is a kernel module to compress data on-the-fly and store it in RAM. Here, we're using it to compress your RAM, then put it back into RAM. (only when necessary)

Some types of data compress better than others. On average, the ZSTD algorithm reaches a 3:1 compression-ratio, but in some cases it can approach 5:1! When used as Swap, this means that theoretically, one RAM chip can store 5 times as much memory! While real-world loads are unlikely to be compressible that much, the results are still impressive. In a recent test, Chromium was instructed to open 200 tabs. (mostly youtube videos)
When everything finished loading, Chromium had consumed 7GB of RAM. However, this test was performed on a Raspberry Pi with only 4GB of RAM! Without ZRAM, the screen would have frozen within seconds. But with ZRAM, the system was still very responsive.

What does this app do?

  • This app will disable the default Swapfile. (By default, RPiOS comes with a pitiful 100MB swapfile that does barely anything) Disabling Swap reduces the number of writes to the SD card, boosting performance while increasing its lifetime.
  • This app will set up ZRAM to extend the usable RAM, when necessary. How much ZRAM? It's calculated based on a 4:1 ratio of your devices available RAM. On a 1GB Pi, there will be 4GB of ZRAM; on a 4GB Pi there will be 16GB of ZRAM. Remember: this relies on data compression, so some situations may not be able to reach the full 4:1 compression ratio.
  • This app will adjust a few kernel parameters to optimize RAM usage.
  • Bonus feature: RAM-based temporary file storage. Use the new /zram folder instead of the /tmp folder to avoid writing to storage.
    Of course, uninstalling this app will revert everything back to how it was.

How do I know if it's working? There are a few ways to check.

  • You can run the htop command to see RAM and Swap usage. Htop will refresh itself every second, just like the Task Manager.
  • You can install Conky from Pi-Apps. This will display the RAM and Swap usage on the desktop. Conky refreshes twice every second.
  • To see more detailed ZRAM information and statistics, run the zramctl command.

Is this app better than the ZRAM tutorials on the Internet? Yes, much better. Not only is this app maximally optimized for low-RAM devices, it is the only configuration to regularly clear out orphaned page files. (this is a common issue with zram normally: because the kernel treats it as swap, memory from dead processes is not cleared out)
This page-flushing is achieved by splitting ZRAM into 4 equal parts. They rotate through a cleaning phase every 5 minutes, keeping active memory pages but dropping the inactive ones.

Overall, this app is designed to get the most out of ZRAM. Even if your device never gets close to running out of RAM, installing this app will unlock more room for file-caching, thereby improving performance while reducing reads and writes to storage.

Fortunately, More RAM is very easy to install on your Linux ARM Device in just two steps.

  1. Install Pi-Apps - the best app installer for Linux ARM Device.
  2. Use Pi-Apps to install More RAM.

Compatibility

For the best chance of this working, we recommend using the latest LTS of Ubuntu or Debian from your hardware manufacturer.
More RAM will run on either an Ubuntu/Debian ARM32 OS or ARM64 OS.

Install Pi-Apps

Pi-Apps is a free tool that makes it incredibly easy to install the most useful programs on your Linux ARM Device with just a few clicks.

Open a terminal and run this command to install Pi-Apps:

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Botspot/pi-apps/master/install | bash

Feel free to check out the Pi-Apps source code here: https://github.com/Botspot/pi-apps

Install More RAM

Now that you have Pi-Apps installed, it is time to install More RAM.
First launch Pi-Apps from your start menu:

Then click on the Tools category.

Now scroll down to find More RAM in the list.

Just click Install and Pi-Apps will install More RAM for you!

Pi-Apps is a free and open source tool made by Botspot, theofficialgman, and other contributors. Find out more at https://pi-apps.io