Swap
“Swap partitions for your working memory. You have 8 GB of RAM and it’s full — your ex’s Instagram, tomorrow’s dentist, the porch light, your boss’s 2-hour-old Slack. We page cold pages out to a journal, a Notes app, and one good friend, then swap them back in on demand at 100× latency, which is why you froze at Whole Foods. Enterprise: dedicated NVMe swap on a burner phone. Sub-ms page-in for your kid’s teacher’s name at pickup. Set vm.swappiness=100 to become a poet. Set it to 0and get a stress rash by Q3.”
The Problem
Your working memory is a fixed 8 GB. Your life is running about 47 GB of unsupervised anxieties. When the resident set exceeds physical, you thrash — you walk into the kitchen for a spoon and leave with a resentment. You forget the word envelopein a work meeting. You call your wife by your dog’s name. The kernel is fine. You are the kernel.
The Solution
A tiered memory hierarchy for a person. Hot pages (your partner’s allergies, the four-digit code to the front door) stay resident. Cold pages (Frankfurt in 2019, the argument about the dishwasher, that thing you said in seventh grade) get evicted to /dev/swap— routed to a Notes app, a therapist, or, in an emergency, your one college friend who still picks up the phone.
sysctl -w vm.swappiness=80 to unlock “yeah, my dad, I guess.”The Page-in from Hell
You see them across the room. A cold page (their laugh, Frankfurt 2019, their sister’s name, the reason) faults. The kernel halts, reads from swap. You are visibly buffering.
Pricing
zswap: “fine, thanks” is 12× smaller than the truth.TAM
free -h on a table of thirtysomethings at a wedding. Six of them started crying and one asked to be alone for a bit.The Ask
$6M seed. 40% to the paging heuristic — deciding which memories are cold is theproduct; get it wrong and you swap out your anniversary to free room for a 2013 subtweet. 25% to secure storage backends (Notes, Day One, one specific friend in Cleveland). 20% to the OOM policy: nobody wants their kid’s allergy killed to make space for a Frankfurt layover. 15% to a lobby sign that reads vm.swappiness = 60 · TALK ABOUT IT.
Series A pitch: “We’re Dropbox, but the files are the things you swore you were over.”