In accordance with some embodiments, compaction, as contrasted with compression, is used to reduce the footprint of a near memory. In compaction, the density of data storage within a storage device is increased. In compression, the number of bits used to represent information is reduced. Thus you can have compression while still having sparse or non-contiguously arranged storage. As a result, compression may not always reduce the memory footprint. By compacting compressed data, the footprint of the information stored within the memory may be reduced. Compaction may reduce the need for far memory accesses in some cases.