Disabling compcache in Ubuntu Jaunty (and Related Swap Errors)

If you have installed Ubuntu recently, you may have compcache enabled. This is a memory-based swap cache and its presence is unnecessary and unexpected in a permanent installation (it was designed for LiveCD operations). There is a bug report about compcache being enabled, along with directions on how to remove it.

This bug can also be seen if you are seeing errors like these:

Mar 6 17:27:29 server kernel: [14438.135859] compcache: Error allocating memory for compressed page: 60594, size=4096
Mar 6 17:27:29 server kernel: [14438.135871] Write-error on swap-device (254:0:484752)
Mar 6 17:27:29 server kernel: [14438.136813] allocation failed: out of vmalloc space - use vmalloc= to increase size.
Mar 6 17:27:29 server kernel: [14438.136824] compcache: Error allocating memory for compressed page: 60595, size=2093
Mar 6 17:27:29 server kernel: [14438.136835] Write-error on swap-device (254:0:484760)
Mar 6 17:27:29 server kernel: [14438.137088] allocation failed: out of vmalloc space - use vmalloc= to increase size.
Mar 6 17:27:29 server kernel: [14438.137098] compcache: Error allocating memory for compressed page: 60596, size=4079
Mar 6 17:27:29 server kernel: [14438.137108] Write-error on swap-device (254:0:484768)

You can also see it when you print swap information with the command swapon -s – if compcache is enabled, one of the swap entries will be “ramzswap”.

To disable compcache completely, do this:

rm -f /usr/share/initramfs-tools/conf.d/compcache && update-initramfs -u

The file compcache contains this line – which is what enables (and sizes) compcache:

COMPCACHE_SIZE="25%"

This was summarized nicely in this email on the ubuntu-users mailing list in February of this year.