Frugal installs and linuxfs compression/loading

[thomasl]

I have a frugal install of MX19.2 ahs and want to make the beast as fast as I can (who doesn't?). The system has 16GB RAM and I am thinking of two ways to optimise linuxfs access:

- loading linuxfs to RAM
- reading from disk but using a very weak compression with superfast decompression

Both strategies have their own tradeoffs, ie a severely compressed linuxfs in RAM uses less RAM but more CPU power, etc...

Are there any empirical data points or anecdotal evidence as to what might be the best strategy here? Or thoughts/ideas/do's and don'ts how to achieve this?

[dolphin_oracle]

I can tell you the hows: remaster using lz4 compression will give you a lessor compressed linuxfs file (rougly twice the size if I remember correctly), and anecdotally I'm told the boot is faster off of disk. not sure if it matters in a totally in-ram scenario. and I'm not sure a human will be able to feel the difference between lz4 and xz (the default) after the system is actually running.

that said, I usually remaster with lz4, but I always run off disk because the systems I use such installs on are ram-limited.

[thomasl]

Thanks DO. It's good to know the "hows" but I am ATM more interested in the "whys" That's why I was asking about empirical data or anecdotal evidence.

I have so far studied this:
https://jonathancarter.org/2015/04/06/s ... cetesting/
and this:
https://catchchallenger.first-world.inf ... LZ4_vs_LZO

but these are of course not specifically dealing with the MX linuxfs use case. So anyone who's done some experiments WRT sqashing and linuxfs please share your findings.