Sorry, I cannot follow you.

There is no reason at all, to not have physical swap when using ZRAM. My physical swap just has a lower priority and is never used, when using ZRAM.

You claim that there is no performance difference, once you have >= 8 GB of RAM. I would assume it is much relevant what kind of usage is thrown at ZSWAP/ZRAM instead of the size. Perhaps you could elaborate, why, in your opinion one will not observe a difference in performance and why this limit would be exactly 8GB? I also use ZRAM on my 8GB machines, with a physical swap partition as backup and physical swap is never touched.

OOM killer is IMHO independent of ZSWAP/ZRAM, because swap space has an upper limit anyway, and a functioning OOM killer is IMHO preferable to a crashed system. I was just surprised, that the OOM killer did not work for me, when using ZSWAP, because IMHO it should have killed the browser in my example.

Finally, why do you claim that ZRAM performs better on low-memory devices, because I do not see a reason that it should, or that such a generic answer makes sense.

Please understand my intention here: I want to understand WHY you make these statements and what is the technical reasoning behind them.

Sorry, my English is not good enough.

ZSWAP basically crashed. The computer had no stutters, it stopped working at all. It did not really feel slower with ZSWAP vs. ZRAM.

I used the same computer with exactly the same desktop/browser configuration, so it should be a ‘fair’ comparison between ZSWAP/ZRAM.

I also have to add, I am using ZRAM on high memory devices, too, w/o any trouble. ZRAM should IMHO even perform better, when you have more memory, because the RAM disk can be bigger and hold more data.

Excellent point! The whole point about ‘LRU inversion’ falls apart, if the data never leaves ZRAM in the first place.

Yeah, seams like it!

Thank you for the warning!

I am not sure I used ‘freezing’ in the correct way, my machine has a full (I guess) out of memory crash. Since the physical swap runs full, I assume i/o should be ok. Sometimes I also install games from GOG on this machine, which is heavy read/write i/o, so again, I guess that i/o is not the problem here.

Thanks a lot for sharing. I am happy, it is not just me.

Fedora uses ZRAM w/o swap by default since a few years AFAIK. ZRAM is to the best of my knowledge also heavily used in Android phones w/o swap and of course Chromebooks w/o swap.

For me, swap is never used when ZRAM is activated, I will probably not setup a partition for new installations of Debian.

I still do not get, why it seems that people like Chris Down are so strong in their recommendation for ZSWAP. Chris seems to work at META and probably sees primary server workloads. But I would expect a developer of his caliber to be able to understand and formulate, where ZRAM beats ZSWAP and the other way around. Even in his article above, he is a little bit more nuanced concerning his recommendations. My personal takeaway for now is, to use ZRAM on desktops unless I really need/want hibernation.

Thank you very much for the links. I already know the information there, I’ll update my question.