Is there any way to setup zram on endless? Using Chrome on an acer 720p is pretty much useless, even with one open tab only. The device has a 16GB ssd and only 2GB of menory. On Ubuntu Mate however it is possibe to surf the web with 10 to 12 Tabs open once zram ist enabled and the little Program swapspace ist installed. I wonder how the experience would be on your arm powered device,must be petty terrible.
I tried using this method https://github.com/Nefelim4ag/systemd-swap, wich has worked with debian before, but there is no “make” anywhwere to be found on your system. I installed the c/c++ ide from the app store but still no make to be found.
Initially i was quite smitten by endless os, but it gets more and more frustrating each time i actually try to do something on it.
Is there any method to enable ZRAM?
@Thomas_Sattler We actually do have a service (eos-enable-zram) that we use to enable zram on devices with 1 GB or less memory. While we could consider raising the threshold to 2 GB, based on our previous testing we did not see a need for zram on our 2 GB devices. I recently tested a 2 GB machine and found that we were fine with a handful of relatively memory-intensive website tabs, though to be clear I was testing Chromium rather than Chrome. When using Chromium, we have a tab discarding feature that kicks in to help with memory issues if too many tabs are open, but I don’t believe Google has enabled that feature for Chrome on Linux yet. Even without the tab discarding, though, I’d expect to be able to open at least a few websites in Chrome with 2 GB of memory, and I can try to test that tomorrow. I’ll also see if zram makes any difference on such a configuration.
That said, if you are seeing the browser being completely useless with just a single tab open, I think there is likely a different problem. The only time I experienced such poor performance was with a graphics device that was not fully supported, which prevented the browser from using graphics acceleration, and the processor (Pentium D in the case I was testing) just could not handle the graphics demands of a modern website (YouTube in my test).
It might be helpful to reboot, open Chrome to the website of interest, and then run eos-diagnostics in the terminal. If you provide the resulting eos-diagnostic-* file that appears in your home directory (and let us know the website URL so we can try to replicate), perhaps we can understand better what graphics device you are using and whether the issue is memory, processing power, or something else. I would really like to understand exactly what is going on, as I would expect a relatively modern computer with 2 GB of memory to run Endless well.
For the details of the service we have, see /lib/systemd/system/eos-enable-zram.service, which calls /usr/sbin/eos-enable-zram with a zram size parameter of 200. The 1 GB threshold is embedded in the /usr/sbin/eos-enable-zram script. I think you could remount the root directory as writable and temporarily adjust the threshold in our script, though any such changes would be “without warranty” and would be removed the next time the OS is updated.
I can understand the frustration with the lack of developer resources. That is something we are actively improving, while maintaining the safety for our target (non-tech-savvy) users through technology such as OSTree for atomic OS upgrades and Flatpak for app distribution, without the pitfalls of apt package management that could be disastrous to novice users.
Roddy
It might not help tremendously in this particular use case (which seems more related to memory consumption) but the next version of Chrome / Chromium (version 57) will feature the ability to lower CPU usage of background tabs, saving battery on laptops and potentially making the system more responsive.
See https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/03/background_tabs and https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/03/chrome-57-background-tab-suspension-download/ for details
Mario
this sounds very interesting.
Since almost a year passed: Did you make any progress in providing an environment for developers? I’d love to see a solid ground with somthing on top, where I can play with actual stuff and developer facilities.
Yes, you can get a developer environment through GNOME Builder which is available in the app center. If you prefer a terminal-based environment, you can use Flatpak SDKs that are available from Flathub (although they’re hidden in the app center, you have to install them from the terminal.)
I myself use either org.gnome.Sdk//3.26 or com.endlessm.apps.Sdk//master, and most developer tools that I’m missing can be overlaid on top of that environment using Flapjack (see my post about that: https://community.endlessos.com/t/announcing-flapjack-developer-tools-for-endless-os/5442)
Closing the loop on this old discussion… We now enable zram by default for all users, as of version 3.3.15.