https://tonym.us/tag/zram.html Recent content in Zram on Tony Metzidis Hugo en-us Thu, 01 Oct 2026 22:30:00 -0700 https://tonym.us/alpine-gce-extreme-memory-survival.html Thu, 01 Oct 2026 22:30:00 -0700 https://tonym.us/alpine-gce-extreme-memory-survival.html <p>In my previous post, we looked at how default Google guest daemons consume over 15% of available memory on a 1 GB Google Compute Engine (<code>e2-micro</code>) instance, pushing standard Debian images into SSH lockout during moderate memory pressure.</p> <p>To see how far we could push the lower boundary of GCE instances without sacrificing reliability, I built a custom minimal Alpine Linux image (<code>alpine-3-24-1-uefi-lite-v5</code>).</p> <p>We subjected this image to a punishing synthetic stress harness: pinning <strong>900 MB to 1,250 MB of memory</strong>, driving <strong>16 concurrent worker threads</strong>, and executing <strong>over 167,000 sub-processes</strong> in five minutes. While standard Debian froze solid, the Alpine instance maintained sub-second SSH logins and responsive interactive keystrokes.</p>