alt Hacker NewsUse zram instead. This from crappy 8G RAM multimedia/browsing minipc I'm on right now. The SSD is quite slow and browser is memory hungry so it was an improvement from on disk swap.
$ zramctl
NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 zstd 3G 482.9M 86.7M 91.8M 4 [SWAP]Replies
fpoling • today at 8:22 PM
On x64 CPU for laptops the memory bandwidth is rather limited and a fast compressor like lz4 can saturate it. As the result latest SSD are faster then z-ram when using hardware encryption on SSD.
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zram is a good choice when data in RAM is very repetetive/compressible. Web browsers is one such load. Android apps is another good one.
When that data doesn't compress well at all, zram is no help and traditional swap-to-storage is a better choice.
And there is a middle-ground option, zswap: swapped out pages will eventually end up on a block device, but are compressed first.