My overall impression of Puppy Linux

[greengeek]

Well, after hours of heavy use and the machine clearly struggling, the swapfile is still not operational. Going to delete the swapfile, does not seem to work for me. .... So the zram is related to new kernels? If so, not good for me because all new kernels hang on this machine at bootup. A laptop with "only" 2GB Ram and 2GHz processing power seems to be scraping the barrel these days.

Are your comments specific to swapfiles or do you mean that you also have no swap partition? If you currently have neither then this is worth a try:

Make a swap partition of say 5GB, then boot your puppy with that partition available.

After booting - hover your mouse over the 'partview' icon in the notification area on the bottom of the screen - and note what puppy sees as your personal storage space (and note the 'free space' too). This figure is now likely to be greater than it would normally be without a swap partition (ie make a note of what it says normally and compare the figures).

(This is because puppy grabs about 30% of the swap partititon - IF IT IS AVAILABLE PRIOR TO BOOTING - and turns it into pseudo-ram. It removes that 30% from the available swap partition functionality and plugs it into the RAM space)

The extra storage space is actually the same sort of thing as the zram that rockedge was referring to - but this ability has been in puppies since early on - regardless of old kernels. Zram and pseudo-ram are similar concepts just coded differently.

But they are totally different to what a swapfile or swap partition does.

As Rockedge mentioned - it won't give much of a speed advantage (because even an SSD swap partition is slower than true RAM) but:
a) it will stop the cpu from choking because it runs out of RAM and needs to juggle code and data so much, and b) it will give you a huge amount of extra working space (even though it is 'pseudo-ram') which allows you to do things puppy can't normally do with only 2GB of real RAM.

I use a 30GB swap partition and puppy grabs about 10GB of that and it allows me to use video processing tools which would otherwise not run at all or would lock up the machine.This effect is nothing to do with swappiness or normal swapfile/swap partition function.

Worth a try for all puppians who run old hardware without savefiles, or who boot from CD.