[Q] Turning off ZRAM not increasing normal available RAM? - Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

I have a Gionee Pioneer P3. It comes with ZRAM enabled by default. See Screenshot
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That's over 300MB for ZRAM. I'd like to disable this zram so that I will have more RAM. I ran swapoff /dev/block/zram0 to disable zram. It did get disabled as seen in the screenshot above. However, when I run "free" command, I see that the amount of RAM has not increased.
Could somebody please tell me what is happening here? How can I make the zram partition available to normal RAM?

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@davidheis zram doesn't use a partition to enable swap, instead it just reserves a bit of real RAM and compresses pages in there, so it's really just a virtual swap. From the looks of it 300MB is fas too much though but anyway the free command won't see this, all it's showing is the total amount of memory available to the user, so disabling zram won't make any difference because as far as it's concerned it doesn't make any difference to the amount of physical memory available.

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HTCDreamOn said:
@davidheis zram doesn't use a partition to enable swap, instead it just reserves a bit of real RAM and compresses pages in there, so it's really just a virtual swap. From the looks of it 300MB is fas too much though but anyway the free command won't see this, all it's showing is the total amount of memory available to the user, so disabling zram won't make any difference because as far as it's concerned it doesn't make any difference to the amount of physical memory available.
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Will it have any effect on game performance if I disable ZRAM? I'm guessing that games will run better with zram disabled because, then, there will be more normal RAM for games to run and the processor will not have to waste time compressing-decompressing stuff. Is this right?
If there is a significant gain by disabling it, I'm planning to disable it permanently.
Sent from my Pioneer_P3 using xda app-developers app

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davidheis said:
Will it have any effect on game performance if I disable ZRAM? I'm guessing that games will run better with zram disabled because, then, there will be more normal RAM for games to run and the processor will not have to waste time compressing-decompressing stuff. Is this right?
If there is a significant gain by disabling it, I'm planning to disable it permanently.
Sent from my Pioneer_P3 using xda app-developers app
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Yeah I expect it will, you might just want to test with and without. Zram is probably better for multitasking, whereas with a game you just want a large chunk of free ram which you want to load the game into so yeah disabling it would be better. If they're still not good then you'll need physically swap instead. There are scripts and even apps to do this.

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with Kernel Adiutor or SP Kernel Manager you can alter the size of the zram0 block in the Virtual Memory section of the app. Ticking the On Boot toggle button you can then peek on the commands executed by going in the On Boot section. From there you could create a startup script with only parts of the commands or you could just set a really small size for zram0 like 8mb.
I haven't tried it yet but apps2sd allows you to create and manage init.d startup scripts.
It is obvious that I am talking only about rooted devices.
edit: found out you can delete boot cmds individually in SP Kernel Manager