On Monday, Apple announced a new update for it’s desktop operating system, which will be named OS X Mavericks. As part of the annoucement, they touched on a few performance related features, including a new power saving API, which was called App Nap, as well as a memory compression feature, which would allow compress the memory of programs that are not currently active.

According to Ars Technica, Apple is using a technique called Timer Coalescing to create App Nap. Apps that are not active will have their processes set to a lower priority, and therefore use less CPU/disk/etc, and thereby save power. This feature has been around on Linux for a long time, and apparently has been part of Windows as well.

I had not heard, however, of this compressed memory technique, although apparently it had been done many years ago by a program called “RamDoubler”. After some quick Googling, it seems that this is available via a kernel module called “zram”.

Wanna try it out? If you’re running Precise or newer (12.04 or later), you’re in luck. Just apt-get zram with

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sudo apt-get install zram-config

and you’re all set.

To see the effects of zram, just run free -m and you’ll notice an increase in memory/swap space. I haven’t thoroughly tested to see the performance gains, but it’s interesting to see that some of the new OS X features are already available elsewhere.