Meta's CRAM prototype reports faster compressed-memory reads than ZRAM

A compressed-memory approach developed by Gregory Price and his team at Meta reports up to 452x ZRAM's performance in read-only tests, Tom's Hardware reported from presentation slides. Called CRAM, it keeps compressed data in RAM and treats it as memory rather than as a swap device, avoiding much of the overhead of swap access. The benefit falls to 5.4x in the worst tested case with 20% writes, because writes require moving memory back for modification. Determining available capacity as data compressibility changes remains an unresolved research problem. The author cautions that the explanation is based on slides rather than attendance at the presentation.