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I was wrong! zswap IS better than zram | LinuxBlog.io

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Rule of thumb / TL;DR:If your system only uses swap occasionally and keeping swap demand within ~20–30% of your physical RAM as zram is enough, ZRAM is

September 1, 2025 by Hayden James, in Blog Linux Rule of thumb / TL;DR: If your system only uses swap occasionally and keeping swap demand within ~20–30% of your physical RAM as zram is enough, ZRAM is the simpler and more effective option. But if swap use regularly pushes far beyond that, is unpredictable, or if your system has fast storage (NVMe), Zswap is the better choice. It dynamically compresses and caches hot pages in RAM, evicts cold ones to disk swap, and delivers smoother performance under heavy pressure. For years I’ve championed zram as the best swap‑related feature you could…

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